It also helps that he has that quality that makes you want to root for him. There’s something attractive about his youth that allows you to see him evolving in front of you. Apparently, yesterday he name checked a transportation Vital City writer when he was asked about streetscape during Congestion Price celebration. There is an openness that draws people in.
The other thing is that while Zohran is super woke he doesn’t seem preachy like he is looking down on you for not agreeing with him. AOC can never fully pivot but she can learn from Zohran on how to deal with skeptics on both culture & econ. He avoids evincing resentment towards either the rich (Bernie) or the culturally conservative (AOC).
Unlike many DSA types, Mamdani really does seem fluent with what the wonky publications are saying. When I met him during my reporting trip last year on the campaign, he seemed to know what Slow Boring was!
[In Mamdani voice] "The key to winning people over: joke with the men, flirt with the women, tell media people you like their substacks. Works every time."
Big deal. Tell me that his response was, "Oh, the Matt Yglesias Substack? Well, yes I completely agree that Politik bedeutet ein starkes langsames Bohren von harten Brettern, as Max originally said" and I'll be moderately impressed.
To a certain extent, the degree to which he can be successful depends on how much he separates himself from the DSA since they're not exactly the wonkiest bunch focused on actual nuts-and-bolts governance.
"He doesn't seem preschy like he is looking down on you for not agreeing with him." If more "progressives" in the past decade or so had been willing and able to do that, Trump wouldn't be where he is.
What I still can’t believe (you’re completely right) how much of a compromise voters were willing to make to teach the scolds a lesson.
I know of at least one who was a lifelong democrat who switched and professed it was the scolding. But I also think it was more to do with Republicans being the party of flexible ethics (he liked the party of the resolute desk blowjob).
Totally agree, to me and again this is anecdotal, we lost the messaging war about this. Most of my lib friends like me, even far left friends, at the end of the day really don't actually care that much what other people are doing it's just that they are drowned out by the posters. The right still really wants to judge you, it's just those evangelicals never signed up for twitter.
I think you've hit on it. I mean, the man charmed Trump.
Nobody likes a scold and Mamdani doesn't shake his finger. He nods, smiles, and persuades. He even seems to listen.
Lest I sound like a hopeless fangirl, I remain detached and observant. I've been sorely burned by charming politicians before, so we will see what happens.
I think you're being a bit unfair on AOC. For example, she started out when she first came to national prominence as a lefty NIMBY and has clearly if not fully embraced at least become more open to YIMBY. Having said that she also very flashily came out to rally for Jamal Bowman, possibly the poster child (at least to me) of really bad lefty ideas for education. So will give this a sort of "thumbs sideways" review.
But the other part. I really really don't think you can overlook the gender issue here as far as people's embrace of Zohran vs AOC. It's at least got to be part of any discussion here. That and the banal answer that Zohran's been a national figure for a much shorter length of time then AOC (your realize she's been a congresswoman for 8 years now right? She's actually not really the fresh face anymore). Point being, he's got a lot of time to generate a record that can be picked apart.
Doesn’t his foreign seemingness and her gender cancel each other out? But I take your point. I do think Zohran is more talented tho. He does moderation more gracefully and elegantly than AOC. He even manages criticism from his own left base better.
When confronted about crushing Chi Osse’s primary ambitions, he told leftist YouTubers like Majority Report that “of course leftists should hold him accountable, good faith people can disagree, it was a difficult decision and he understands where people are coming from.” AOC, on the other hand, gets v defensive and takes it personally. She handled the shitstorm over iron dome funding by hiding away from her position and imo gaslighting people by saying they were misunderstanding her. Ofc she was right about her stance but Zohran has a much softer touch imo
AOC isn’t annoying, but Dems should stop running women for president unless there’s someone with just 99th percentile charisma in the running and there isn’t anyone close to that
Hillary wasn't far off but she definitely had a lot of political baggage and certainly not a charismatic person. I think a popular governor of a swing state would do well, regardless of gender.
I think Dems should not run a female candidate for president until after the GOP has elected a female president. That's what I think it would take to break the barrier.
Maybe the best thing would be to forget about the “barrier” and judge candidates as individuals instead of identities. Worry about ensuring equal opportunity for regular people and let politicians find a way to achieve their ambitions.
I've been saying for a while that the first female president will be republican - do you not believe that? Do you think the sexism that infects a lot of right-leanining ideologies makes that unlikely? I just figure someone pretty, with big boobs, who loves GAWD, GUNS, and AMERICA and is or talks like they barely graduated middle school but is also an evil bastard.
That just sounds like someone being a normal politician, telling his audiences what they want to hear regardless of whether he intends to follow through.
Most absolutely do, otherwise they wouldn't be able to get elected and reelected in the first place. Mamdani barely mustering more than 50% of the vote in deep-blue NYC during the election with Trump as president isn't really suggestive of some impressive political skillset.
I wish we had more politicians on both sides barely mustering 50% in safe seats. Being able to do that is its own form of skill - it means he knew exactly how far he can push things without losing. (I know, he wasn't going to lose when Sliwa got 7%, but he couldn't count on Sliwa staying in the race)
He gambled that older residents and homeowners don't have as much power now as they used to, and he was right. He redefined politics in NYC along a different axis than the traditional red-blue axis. Clearly he's not a bad politician. Even if you don't like him, you underestimate him to your peril.
Cuomo was running as a disgraced, deeply unpopular independent who had the backing of Trump and Elon and multiple GOP donors, while Mamdani was the Democratic nominee and had the full backing of the Democratic Party.
So, I think you're both right, but defining politician differently. If you mean 'can win in a close inter-party race' I think Sam's right. If you mean, 'can win an intra-party fight to get a safe seat,' I think Siddhartha's right. The thing about Mamdani is he ran a competitive campaign in a safe seat.
I’m defining political skills more generally - being able to answer questions, have a conversation, being likable/charismatic, etc. The vast majority of politicians do not have those skills. He has a lot of baggage in terms of his background and policies, which would make him unelectable in most places. Those are not related to his political skills. The political skills lie in being able to downplay his past comments.
Eh, in my experience, being able to answer hard questions from the public, and do press interviews well are skills that most folks winning in actually competitive inter-party elections have to some degree? Where you see disasters are in folks who either are running doomed campaigns, or who got to their spot via intra-party politics, rather than convincing voters?
He *does* project a winning personality, but I very much want politicians to focus on *doing things* rather than opining on things outside of their purview. Telling audiences what they want to hear is a big part of what got us to this point, IMO.
He also plainly just loves the city, and loves city life. He has a sunny vibe of "This is a wonderful place and we can fix our problems." It's great to have an NYC mayor who likes it there.
I feel like you unwittingly made the case for why new fresh faces taking power is actually pretty important to a functioning democracy.
You’re note about how in DC it’s the younger council members who are more YIMBY is instructive. You’ve touched on this before but I think it’s really underemphasized how much the YIMBY/NIMBY divide is an old vs young thing and not a right vs left thing.
I think about our last two presidents and how much their mental mindset of the world was basically set in the 70s and 80s. For Biden, it meant supporting old school unions like Dock Workers when it wasn’t all that clear this is a group worth supporting anymore given realities of modern technology. It also meant treating the Presidency as a senate majority leader straight out of the late 80s and early 90s which is likely how you got “the groups” getting too much influence* (that and it seems like his focus was extremely foreign policy oriented which meant domestic concerns kind of feel by the wayside).
For Trump it’s almost a cartoonish version of this. I still think “protect the housewives of Long Island” is an underrated window into his worldview. I feel like David Roth nailed this when he noted that somewhere around 1990 Trump’s brain turned to goo and he became incapable of learning anything new. Hence is late 80s obsession with tariffs never changing.
I think in cities it’s a little bit different but has similar dynamics of council members winning in uncompetitive elections and basically protecting in the desires of various interest groups that got their ear years maybe decades prior (guessing this how absurd rules around building scaffolding in NYC manage to stay around. Zohran that’s a good one to tackle).
So all in all. Somewhat tongue in cheek, I guess I’m calling for “Gallego 2028”.
* in fairness, Biden’s long time in the senate probably did help pass more bills than expected. We sort of forget how much more legislatively successful his term was than we expected. But it still sort of came about because of Biden’s ability to play on sort of the last vestiges of how senate worked 30 years ago instead of tackling the inert institution it’s become today.
Great comment. The grip of the gerontocracy is strong and explains both the sense of political stasis, the strong risk-averse behavior, and rising discontent from younger citizens.
I've noted before UK is almost a "sneak preview" of political developments in America right down to "Brexit" happening due to similar dynamics driving Trump's 2016 victory.
Big one I note all the time is UK's median age is higher than the US, so a lot of fights over pensions and NIMBY has a ton to do with aging Pensioners who own their "council flats" and younger generations being left out (the age skew of voting in UK at least until recently (we'll see how much the rise of the Reform Party change this dynamic) is even more pronounced than in the US*. Can't be emphasized enough how much the Tory Party remained in power for so long based on the votes of people over 65).
The extreme NIMBYism in UK has some pretty unique UK aspects for sure (much smaller country for one so land is more of a premium. The green belt around London which is especially important since London basically is the UK economy. A much more (depressingly) "back in the good ole days" mindset than in US likely having to do with some weird overhang of the downfall of British Empire (this is some real psychoanalyzing on my part, but my hypothesis is there is something to this)). But the big one just like in US is the old vs young dynamic.
* I will repeat to the cows come home, but if only Gen Z voted, Harris wins the Presidency by pretty comfortable margin. Not a landslide but definitely comfortable. The whole "Gen Z is super right wing" narrative was kind of garbage from the beginning. I think it's correct to say that a lot of commentary assuming "Gen Z" would be super left or demonstrably more left that Millennials was also likely bunk. But that's demonstrably different than saying "Gen Z" is right wing. I actually though this slate piece was illuminating. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/gen-z-manosphere-millennials-progressive-trump.html. It's illuminating to me because it unintentionally shows much media is still beholden to the idea that Gen Z men are right wing. I look at this and think "So Gen Z are less racists than older generations and basically have the same gender views as Millennials. So on net, more culturally left than older generations". Instead what it shows (to me) is younger men with mores sexist attitudes sorting into the GOP. Like, not good! Especially since these will be the backbone of GOP in 10-20 years. But also very different then saying Gen Z men overall are more sexist.
It's interesting I had always thought that the big battle to save social security in its current structure in the W Bush days was vindicated by the financial crisis. Now I wonder in light of lower fertility if we haven't locked ourselves in on entitlements in such a manner that virtually guarantees an even worse crisis over the next 25-30ish years, as boomers draw on entitlements that in their minds they earned for far longer than passed generations, with fewer young adults than ever entering the work force. The youngest of them are only just now getting into their 60s and it's fully plausible that they will vote in a bloc and cling to power in a manner that prevents structural reforms until my kids (Gen Alphas) are getting towards their 30s. Unless AI robots usher in a true paradigm shifting level of productivity that can be redistributed in a manageable way we could really be putting our fingers on the scale towards our own decline.
This is probably a bigger deal than whatever partisan alignment looks like 20 years from now. However I wouldn't necessarily be so sanguine on that either, just because the Zoomers edged for Harris. I'd like to think my sons will see through the nonsense of the MAGA if that type of conservatism remains ascendant but I have no idea why they'd support Democrats if the trajectory doesn't change significantly.
In the specific case of Social Security, I think it's right to be worried that given an aging population and given the diminishing amount of money in the Social Security Trust Fund* some sort of Social Security reform is likely necessary...and that the 2005 attempt at Social Security reform was a terrible way of going about it, which I think was vindicated by the 2008 crash (if private accounts have been introduced earlier or if the final bill included provisions for people close to retirement or just retired to put their money fully in the market, the recession may have been actually depression 2.0 given how much that would hurt the purchasing power of retirees. Setting aside the moral stain of passing a policy that put a bunch of retirees in poverty basically unnecessarily).
Much better in my view to raise the payroll tax cap. I'll tell you from personal experience how jarring it was when my salary reached a particular level and seeing how at some point during the year, my paycheck was demonstrably larger than the last one kind of randomly. It really hit home to me how absurd the cap is. Like, why am I receiving this financial windfall?
*One thing that is worth noting is right wing propaganda is very very dishonest about this. Read enough think pieces about the trust fund from right wing sources and you'd think Social Security will be literally bankrupt by 2030 which is not even close to being true. Think there is a world of difference between "we need to reform social security so it doesn't become too burdensome to the finances of the US government" (pretty sure this is Matt's position) and "we need to eliminate social security entirely because we are in thrall to a) some old testament view of poverty, b) a deranged commitment to finding any way to put more money in rich people's pockets and c) a pathological antipathy to welfare state generally".
I think it's very very important to note that 2005 social security private accounts was going to be part of a longer term plan to unravel social security entirely.
Sure and to be clear I wasn't endorsing the particulars about the specific policy prescriptions at issue in 2005. What I'm worried about is that age demographics and voting patterns (plus of course the general brain melting effect MAGA has had on the GOP) have put us in a place where it isn't even politically possible to have the sane version of the conversation. In that regard at least we may be worse off than we were back then.
I can’t say I don’t enjoy the extra money in my paycheck, but I’d happily give it up if:
- The cap was removed entirely.
- People who make over a certain amount in non-payroll income are made to contribute to the fund as if they made at least some reasonable percentage of their income from payroll income.
"Much better in my view to raise the payroll tax cap. I'll tell you from personal experience how jarring it was when my salary reached a particular level and seeing how at some point during the year, my paycheck was demonstrably larger than the last one kind of randomly. It really hit home to me how absurd the cap is. Like, why am I receiving this financial windfall?"
Aah yes. That terrible feeling when you get a bigger paycheck. That's the worst. /s
The oldest Boomers started turning 80 this year, which is the point at which turnout starts to drop rapidly (both through death and through disability which makes voting sufficiently difficult that they stop voting).
Until now, the people dropping out of the retired-people voting bloc were mostly Silents (a smaller generation), they should be majority-Boomers starting from about this year. For a few years, that'll stabilise the retired voter numbers, but then in about 2030, the people retiring will be Gen X (another small generation), and the retired voting bloc will be falling as Boomers die or lose the ability to vote and smaller numbers of Xers retire to replace them. Obviously, if people live longer that will compensate to some degree, but the differences in cohort size are substantial (and life expectancy, while still rising, is doing so very slowly now).
The aging dynamics are, of course, long-term towards an older population. But medium-term they run in the opposite direction because of cohort effects.
I hear what you're saying but it's not like younger people are going to be in stasis while this is happening, and doubly so if the government is being primarily run by older people whose interests continue to align more with the 80+ year olds dying or dropping out of the electorate for other reasons. We're already getting some previews of what it looks like when the state is geared more towards the interests of empty nester retirees than prime age working people with families. It isn't good, particularly to the extent the entire system operates on the assumption of the continued creation of new prime age working people with families.
I’m just saying that the prime age working people will be a bigger share of the overall electorate in 10-20 years time than they are now, so there may be some amelioration of this.
[Or, put it another way, the bias in favour of pensioners will switch off the moment Gen X retires, because Gen X always gets screwed by every generational change]
I'm operating under the assumption that when the trust is no longer able to pay out at 100% under current funding, something that will occur a mere 7 years from now, the first thing they'll do is raise the retirement age and the second thing they'll do is start some kind of phased in means testing scheme... beginning with the youngest Xers. Sadly if I'm certain about anything it's that those at age will ultimately shuffle off their mortal coils with a bar tab left for us and our kids.
The first thing they should do is raise the salary cap, then they should raise the money elsewhere, ideally from noncitizens, but it’s ok to just print it too. We should be lowering, not raising, the retirement age, particularly when AI related job loss is on the horizon
Perhaps we should revive the British Empire.* All the cool kids are doing it these days, and it’s not like most other countries are doing a great job of running themselves or anything. Rule Brittania!
Hence why it's a good idea to have a mixture of both. Or maybe more importantly have a mixture of both in positions of power. Democrats and GOP obviously have a number of younger politicians. But the former has a leadership that's dominated by very old members (or at least was through end of Biden administration) and the latter is currently a cult around a 79 year old man who can't stay awake and seems to be deteriorating by the day.
If he wins the White House that justifies whatever risk we face with that Senate seat. If he doesn't win the nomination (or heaven forbid loses in the general) then he's still a Senator.
I don’t know much about Gallego, but I haven’t seen another Democrat that comes close to being as good a candidate as Mark Kelly. And luckily for us, Hegseth is pissing him off enough he might put his hat in the ring
I like Kelly. Maybe a little dull but just a solid good guy.
Gallego has a lot going for him. Comes from a poor broken family, got to Harvard and then went to the heart of the fighting in Iraq leading a Marine unit. Latino male who despises "Latinx" wokeness and yet leads the charge against the Stephen Millers running our government right now. Excellent policy ideas on climate and energy* while also teaching us about how young males want their "big ass truck." Comes from a swing state (like Kelly of course) and knows how to defeat a polished but empty Republican blowhard, in his case Kari Lake.
Also, 15 years younger than Kelly (who again I like!) After 12 years of Trump/Biden/Trump, the younger the better.
Hence my qualifier "somewhat". I actually do think Gallego is a real viable possibility in 2028 and I've liked what I've seen of him so far.
The "tongue in cheek" comment is just me noting that we have a long long long way to go before 2028. I find it incredible how many pundits talk as though Gavin Newsome has the nomination sewn up (including Matt). If the "hot" candidate 3 years out from an election had some consistent track record of being the nominee than we would have President Mario Cuomo in 1992 and candidate Scott Walker in 2012.
My default preference is a Governor over a Senator because that's closer to the job profile. Purely based on who can do the job better, I would prefer Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, Gretchen Whitmer, Jared Polis or Roy Cooper over any Senator or a blue state Governor. Any Senator or Wes Moore/Gavin Newsom are Tier 2 candidates.
I'm not sure I see the case you are aiming for. Fresh faces do not, in and of themselves, mean anything?
Experience, we would like to think, helps a ton. But in cooperation based activities, the desired trait is almost certainly a neutrality to everyone you will be bringing to the table. As well as an honest field in which to bring people there. That is, the most neutral and likeable agent in the world can't help if there is an active desire to wreck things from someone.
In that last case, you need someone that has political capital that they can spend to influence things. In fact, I think I would probably cede that political capital is far more important than experience in leadership. It always enacts a cost to get people to agree with things you want them to do. If you are lucky, it is more costly for people to defect from your lead than it is for them to follow. If you have windfalls from your decisions, this compounds.
This "billionaire positivity" thing, as just being some natural outgrowth of "respecting the profit motive" is a huge bait and switch.
The profit motive can lead to many things. It can lead to good products sold for cheap. It can lead to Thai fishermen enslaving Burmese migrants so they can cheaply harvest trash fish for shrimp farms. Both of those are logical outcomes of people acting according to a motive to maximize profit.
As the famous quip on reddit goes, "Once you reach $999,999,999, we give you a plaque that says, “congratulations, you won capitalism,” and we name a dog park after you."
You never addressed the basic public effects of having a group of people with massive fortunes on the wider polity.
Why did we use to have an estate tax? It was partially because we as Americans looked over at Europe and thought, "Man, it's bad that there is this class of landed nobility who just inherited all their wealth and then crowd out other people's access to land, money, and opportunities."
The piece that you wrote made a good case that most billionaires "earned" their wealth in the sense that they did something novel for it. They aren't princes inheriting estates. But it was rather like reading a defense of monarchy where the defense rests on the idea that "Actually, this new batch of kings successfully intrigued/fought to seize the throne rather than inherit it, so this basic autocrat - peasant relationship should not be complained about."
I would be very curious to hear what Matthew Yglesias thinks the relationship between money and political speech and the entire information ecosystem should be. The billionaire piece didn't really answer it.
Frank Luntz and the creation of the term "death tax" as a way to con people into believing that the estate tax was illegitimate is one of the great messaging coups of the 90's. I know we still have an estate tax, but the threshold has been raised very high and it is easy to get around.
Rich people inheriting millions is a concern too if the issue is as OP put it “it's bad that there is this class of landed nobility who just inherited all their wealth and then crowd out other people's access to land, money, and opportunities.” $15 million are still much more than what most people could make in their whole career (it’s $375k for 40 years, which is really more like $700k pretax! And you have to discount to present value which makes it even more), and it crowds out things like housing explaining why the price-income ratio is so high for housing—people are not only using current income to pay for it.
Your math is extremely, extremely off on account of missing compounding returns from investing. This is somewhat unrealistic but you can do it in Excel in five minutes: If you assume that someone starts with 0, saves $21000 a year every year for 40 years of working, which compounds at a 7% rate of return, then retires and lives for another 20 years without drawing down those savings, which continue to compound at 7%, then you get to $15.2 million by year 60. I recognize that $21000 a year is a lot to save for a lot of people, but we’re talking a fairly normal middle-class level of savings, not an investment banker level of savings.
I'm confused how they're living in retirement without drawing down those savings. Isn't that what those savings are for? If they're retired and not working, what are they living on?
At retirement in your scenario, they have something like $5M.
It's so powerful that I instinctively went to correct you that it's $210,000, not $21,000, but no you're correct that it's $21k. Which again, is not a small amount but also within the realm of a normal middle-class level of savings.
This is a bit of an exaggeration given that for most people, rich people very much included, most wealth is capital appreciation. If you assume someone starts working at 22, works until 72 and immediately dies, they'd need to save ~$75000 a year at a 7% real rate of return.
You absolutely have to be rich to afford that, but it's an order of magnitude less than you're claiming.
Yeah but the guy that inherited $15m is going to be appreciating even faster than you due to starting with a higher base. If they earn 5% and get $750,000 for free it’s extremely rare to earn that high salary. Capital appreciation makes it even harder for wage-earners to catch up to heirs.
It's also a lot less than the Minister of Information got from building her fake university and the sale of her blog. Being born a millionaire is benign by comparison.
Luntz would like you to think that. But from my research, the term "death tax" wasn't all that important. The estate tax repeal movement took off (and, for a while, won) because they had
(1) a hard core of highly motivated true believers (like Harold Apolinksy)
(2) a potent moral argument ("double taxation" is unfair)
(3) an effective reframing ("it's not about billionaires, it's family farms!")
(4) an opposition that was weak (unions) and indecisive (life insurance, charity)
and finally
(5) a highly funded, well-organized network that took many years to build.
Survey evidence suggests that people were more persuaded by the moral argument about unfairness than by the "death" moniker. And the moral argument had another role, according to Shapiro and Graetz: it held the repeal coalition together. When the Democrats offered the farmers a sweetheart carve-out, they refused. It wasn't just about naked self-interest for them anymore. One reflected, How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I sold out?
I think there's also the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" aspect to the thinking. "RSN my crypto ship will come in and I will want to pass my billions on to my children."
Part of the problem is that Gore was making a fundamentally wonky, interests-based argument. The tax doesn’t apply to too many people, so it probably won’t hurt you. Meanwhile Bush had a more more emotional, moral argument. The tax is just wrong.
The exemption is $15m and there are trusts to cover amounts beyond that. Tons of people inherit single-digit-millions without paying any tax which is still more than they could make with a lifetime of work paying 40% tax. Thus the high estate tax exemption is still contributing to a society where it matters more how rich your parents were than what you did in your career.
Trusts do not generally let you avoid the gift/estate tax.
Trusts are either revocable (subject to estate tax) or irrevocable (subject to gift tax). They are from a tax standpoint just giving your heirs money as part of your estate or as a gift, respectively.
EDIT: Trusts exist to maintain strict control over money, not avoid taxes.
If I give my 15 year old kid a million dollar gift and tell him "please invest this wisely", that counts against my estate tax exemption and my kid will waste it on cars and booze. If I put that million dollar gift in an irrevocable trust that he gets access to at age 35 and I invest it wisely for him, that also counts against my estate tax exemption but now it'll pay for my grandkids' private school. The tax implications are the same, but my control over the money is greater with a trust.
Trusts are overwhelmingly about control, not tax evasion.
Trusts are designed to either avoid probate (if revocable) or make a strings-attached gift (if irrevocable). Neither of these lets you avoid estate taxes.
There are some estate-tax-dodging trusts, but the structure is not some magic get-out-of-estate-tax-free thing. The basic idea is: if you know that some asset you own is going to appreciate a lot in the next five years, you can use a special type of trust that lets you transfer just the appreciation (not the principal) to your kid. The IRS and economic theory say that future appreciation is worth just the risk-free interest rate (anything more is already priced in, right?) and so the gift is worth zero. But obviously it's not worth zero, because you have some handy insider info that says it's not.
There are ways you can do roughly this without a trust (using options), but they're dicier from a "will I get audited, and how bad will it be if I lose the audit" standpoint.
See my reply to Helikitty -- there are trusts that have estate-tax-dodging features, but they're mostly equivalent to selling your kid a total return swap against some asset you own that you think will appreciate a lot in the near future. It's just that the trust structure is more legally bulletproof / less likely to get you audited.
I would ask Felix Salmon about that. Something he has noted I think at least a couple times is basically no one pays the estate tax given all the various loopholes and ways we've made it possible for people of means to avoid paying the tax.
It's sort of the Holy Roman Empire of taxes; an entity that exists on paper but is functionally irrelevant as an institution/policy.
As I understand it, and I definitely could be wrong, inherited stocks are treated as having not appreciated and the capital gains are ignored, which seems like a huge dodge. I'm sure there are countless other loopholes that make inheritance for the super rich essentially untaxed.
Right, to it avoids capital gains. You buy for $10, it appreciates to $100 when you die, and that $90 in profit is never taxed. If you earned that money through non-capital gains means, it would have been taxed as you earned it, and then the inheritor would be taxed on the estate. Death avoids capital gains taxes. It's a huge loophole that lets rich people live on loans against their gains and never pay tax on it.
That's an argument against the step-up basis (which I would be fine getting rid of so long as the capital gains tax is indexed to inflation), not in favor of the estate tax.
They want to get at stepped up basis without doing the legwork to understand how and why. Even Mitt Romney came out against it now. Unsure why it hasn't caught political fire.
I’d like to preface this by saying I’m basically a Maoist when it comes to estate taxes — I think inherited wealth is illegitimate so I’m predisposed to agree with you.
The issue though is that our polity would probably be better if billionaires had more influence over things. Climate change, immigration, tariffs, foreign aid — all are issues that I’d bet you and I agree more with the typical billionaire than the typical populism-poisoned voter.
I’m not super-sure about that last paragraph, at least the most powerful politically active billionaires are Trump followed by Musk and I’d go with the median voter over them.
But also taxes don’t really fall on the average voter; they fall on high-income wage-earners. If estate taxes were higher the overall tax burden could come down and this would predominantly give more resources to high-income wage-earners. ChatGPT says the type of person who pays the highest taxes in the US is “A senior executive, physician, or lawyer earning $500k–$2M+ in salary in California or New York.” Is the average billionaire more liberal than that type of person? That’s more questionable.
Totally agree with your point about the most politically active billionares. It doesn't really matter what the "average billionaire" thinks, but rather the ones who have used their money to be most influential, such as Larry Ellison and Elon Musk. The democrat billionaires like Soros and Bloomberg either got outflanked, or lack interest in pursuing things like "buy twitter and control the internet vibes" or "buy a movie studio and control hollywood vibes"
You (or someone) said that before and I responded that, to my understanding, it’s totally wrong and billionaires are, as a class, hard right. Do you have a link showing you’re right and I’m wrong?
None of "climate change, immigration, tariffs, foreign aid" are inconsistent with wanting lower taxes and less spending. (I guess foreign aid is spending, but billionaires are mostly smart enough to know it's a tiny fraction of the total and that the great majority is entitlements).
What "life"'s work? The dead life? Are treating rich people like Pharaohs where they are buried with all their earthly wealth as if their dead body still has some claim to it?
Taxing dead people is probably more ethical than taxing living ones, all things considered.
As it is, taxing dead people is really a tax on "people who happened to have the right parents" as the heirs didn't do anything to create said accumulated wealth.
No, the only ethical defense I see is taxing the transfer to the new heirs. What’s special about dying that allows the state to tax a dead person? They’ve already had their chances at the apple with the dead person during their life.
It’s a transfer of wealth from one person to another. If your employer transfers wealth to you, you have to pay tax on it. The government already got to tax your employer on the money they made, why do they get to tax it again when the employer gives it to you?
If you want to take the libertarian position that all taxes are theft then fine, but taxing unearned wealth from people who just happened to have rich parents seems much fairer than taxing wealth from people who are actively contributing to society to earn it.
The person who inherited it (e.g. not the person who built it, but whatever) is optimizing their own personal happiness. The state would be optimizing for societal goals.
I'm a better steward of money than my broke cousin. That doesn't mean he'd be better off if I took half his paycheck.
Are you a hard libertarian opposed to all taxation?
If you aren't, and you accept that we need some taxes, why do you think estate taxes on the very rich are *worse* than, say, payroll taxes on the poor?
This is the better way altogether. Just tax inheritances as income, with perhaps a modest standard deduction (say 200% of the value of the median home, so people aren’t normally forced to sell grandma’s house)
Money is the creation of the state and the state is *allowed*, perfectly ethically, to tax 100% of any dollars or property within its borders. It merely chooses not to do so sometimes for very good consequentialist reasons.
With extremely high estate tax rates people will just give their kids big gifts while they're alive.
If the estate tax rate is higher than the top income tax rate, you can just hire your kid to do a no-show job and pay them a zillion dollars for it. And in fact I think this is why the estate tax (40%) is roughly equal to the top income tax bracket (37%).
Read my next sentence after the one you're replying to (you can disguise gifts as, e.g. no-show jobs, and there's a strong incentive to do this if the income tax rate is lower than the gift/estate tax rate).
EDIT: also to be really clear, it doesn't even need to be a no-show job. You can just pay your kid a lot more money than they're actually worth to do a job they're kind of bad at. Plenty of parents already do this without estate tax incentives.
Let's say I'm the sole owner of a company worth $100 million. I founded the company, so my cost basis is ~$0.
I can give my kid the company in my estate (so he pays 40% of $100 million in estate taxes) or hire him, issue a gazillion new shares, and grant him all of them as RSUs (on which he'd pay 37% in income taxes).
The end result is the same -- he pays ~$40 million in taxes.
“As it is, taxing dead people is really a tax on "people who happened to have the right parents" as the heirs didn't do anything to create said accumulated wealth.”
What does that have to do with anything? At some point in most wealthy people’s history, someone did something remunerative. With this attitude, why aren’t we taxing corporations out of existence that we don’t think are doing anything exciting?
A corporation is an actively existing organization of people who are doing things. It has corporate person hood. People aren't companies. These two things are completely different.
Why should a tobacco company continue to exist? They market death? Their salad days were 60 years ago. Surely the state could make better use of their assets?
Is your argument that we shouldn't have taxes at all? If not, then can we agree that
1) there need to be some taxes and
2) that without estate taxes, then other taxes have to be higher
3) It seems odd that we would let someone who is getting a large amount of wealth not pay some of it in taxes so that we make people who don't have a lot of wealth pay more in taxes.
A large reason that people work so hard is to give their kids a better life and a head start.
When you nix that you greatly disincentive people from working very similar to an income tax.
And of course that money was already taxed once by the income tax, so you are doubly taxing it causing even further disincentive to the wealth creation in the first place.
I’m kind of surprised to see this line from you—I don’t think of you as dishonest or a demagogue. Taxing is not “wiping out,” and what’s being taxed isn’t the person’s work, but the inheritor’s income. People get taxed on income! It’s like saying, “I get taxed on my income, and then when I purchase something with the income that remains I gotta pay sales tax? Make it make sense!”
Once the person is dead, why does any one person have a greater claim on their work than any other?
If someone dies intestate with no heir, then their assets escheat to the Sovereign (the Crown or the two bona vacantia Duchies in the UK, the State in the US, or the federal government outside the states). In effect, it passes to the government as a representative of the community as a whole.
Why should an heir or a testator hold a claim that is senior to the community as a whole?
"If someone dies intestate with no heir, then their assets escheat to the Sovereign"
This is only true if the decedent has left no will or other instructions for their estate. If they have, then generally those instructions will followed in the distribution of their assets.
I missed that. That being said, what's the point of your original comment? Were you suggesting that the state should have precedence over heir's or wills and we treat all assets on death the way we do those who are intestate? I have a hard time thinking of a more politically toxic proposal.
Sure, I accept absolutely that this is a really unpopular idea because most people don’t agree with me.
But I’d really like to hear some sort of argument about why any person has any preferential right to the property of a decedent over any other. There seems to be just an assumption that “their kids get their stuff when they die” and I don’t get why. I don’t see how I have any greater claim to my parents’ stuff when they die than anyone else does. I mean, I’ll take the windfall if/when it comes, but if the law changed, I’d shrug my shoulders and move on.
I think we have to step back and see what outcome is better for society rather than contemplate what seems fairest (like the high tax rate post WWII that encouraged investment in manufacturing over paying taxes).
The step up in basis should be eliminated at least. That rule has never made sense to me and I don't think there's any principled justification for it.
As for estate taxes in general, I think they're as legitimate or illegitimate as taxes in general. A lot of the events that we decide are taxable are pretty arbitrary. Why do I pay extra tax on liquor? Why do I pay property tax, sales tax, income tax in some states but not others? Taxation on an estate doesn't seem any more ridiculous than any of this other stuff, and I think it probably has fewer negative repercussions. There's something pretty corrosive about large amount of inherited wealth, both in terms of how its perceived by people in general, and what it does to the recipient -- having met quite a few "lucky" inheritors myself and seeing how it affects their life and personality.
The rich people *that we know of* aren’t princes inheriting estates because there are securities laws requiring you to disclose ownership if you have a large percentage of a public company as founders do.
Someone who inherited a couple million from parents decades or even centuries ago and has just been collecting interest and returns could stay anonymous if they wanted to and there are probably a lot of people who are in that camp—remember people calculated that if Trump had taken his family money in the 70s and just put it in an index fund, he’d be even richer today and would still be a billionaire. Lots of people probably actually did that (it seems like an easy and obvious thing to do) and we just don’t know them.
"I would be very curious to hear what Matthew Yglesias thinks the relationship between money and political speech and the entire information ecosystem should be. "
Money is speech. You clearly have a 1st amendment right to use your money to promote whatever viewpoint that you want.
Moreover, this is clearly correct. The world doesn't work otherwise. People forget but Citizens United was literally about the government telling people that they couldn't release a movie. Moreover, they argued in court that they could literally stop someone from releasing a book.
There isn't a world that works otherwise. There will always be news companies, or social media companies that can put their thumb on the scale in some manner. And government control over that is WAY worse than the private sector control.
I'd also note that most people who complain about CU clearly haven't read the decision. A few points:
- Nowhere did the Court declare that money is speech, though it observed that money can purchase speech. That was true even at the Founding: Ben Franklin owned a newspaper and could easily disseminate his POV more easily than the average American. The same held later for people like William Lloyd Garrison and William Randolph Hearst.
- CU didn't declare "corporations are people". That canard actually traces to an 1886 SCOTUS case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. The headnote to that opinion was written by the Court's "Reporter of Decisions" and NOT by a justice. It says "One of the points made by and discussed at length in the brief of counsel...was that "corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment...Before argument, Chief Justice Waite said: The court does not wish to hear argument on whether the Fourteenth Amendment...applies to these corporations [as persons]. We are all of the opinion that it does." In later cases (1938, Hugo Black) and 1949 (William Douglas) referred to the Santa Clara case as conferring personhood status on corporations under the Constitution.
- In CU, the Court merely noted that corporations are associations of people (as are unions) and thus constraining their speech is unconsitutional
- The Court observed that it was illogical and inequitable to treat CU differently from corporations that owned major media outlets such as newspapers, and broadcast and cable providers. To do so would be to hold that - say, the NYT or ABC - was entitled to state its election preferences right up to the day of an election while denying the right to other organizations solely on the basis of their legal form of organization, which was identical to that of most media outlets. Any distinction between CU and, for example, the NYT or ABC would be arbitrary if that distinction was based on their legal existences as corporations.
I don't think it is a bait and switch as Matt explicitly distinguishes between respecting the profit motive and billionaire positivity? The whole point is Mamdani has the first, but isn't coming around on the second? So they aren't the same?
Which is again, and I harp on this a lot, why the estate tax is a shittily designed tax. If it’s to prevent a class of landed gentry, then we should reward when bequests aren’t made on the basis of primogeniture. But that’s not the way the estate tax is.
Say your estate is $100m. The estate tax is the same (and it’s high, like close to half of it), no matter whether you choose to leave it to one person or whether you divide among 100 heirs. But leaving $1m to someone, while life-changing, isn’t putting that person into the class of idle gentry, unlike leaving someone $100m. We should be encouraging the division of large fortunes during inheritance by basing the inheritance tax per capita not on the basis of the total estate.
Ok, but Cea Weaver is head of his Office to Protect Tenants. TBD I guess whether she has influence in the admin (I’ll grant that deputy mayors are typically more influential than directors of newly created “offices”) but there’s nuance to this picture that you’re eliding.
I know she's a big rent control zealot and a proud hater of private developers, but I don't think any of her work will have any impact on housing supply in the city. Her job is basically going after shitty landlords for housing violations. Maybe she oversteps from time to time, but that's a negligible and indirect impact on supply.
Well the rhetoric she’s going with is “we’re going to abolish private property”, to paraphrase only slightly. And the specific direction Mamdani et al talked about going after shitty landlords consisted of remediating via confiscation and management by the city. I dunno man. I am confident (having spoken to some) that private developers do notice when the asset they’re building that they want to pitch for 50+ years of returns to Qatari oligarchs is at risk of being confiscated after 30.
I did a clinic during my last year of law school that had me appearing in DC's landlord/tenant court on a weekly basis. It was eye opening how many unintended consequences flowed from the DC Council's attempts to "protect tenants". When you tip the scales so heavily in one direction you don't end up with magically perfect landlords maintaining idyllic properties. You end up with LOTS of truly awful landlords because the decent ones don't want to subject themselves to all the rules and regulations you've put in place that allow tenants to do things like live in your property for years without paying rent.
It was awfully hard to go through that experience and not come out of it at least a little bit more conservative on the issue than I had been going in.
If you are referring to Pinnacle -- the one in bankruptcy -- I don't think NYC sued them, just made comments that they would "intervene" in the bankruptcy. Which I think means enforce the regulations on the debtors-in-possession, but not sure.
No, they didn't. They appeared at the bankruptcy hearing. Suits are automatically stayed while a company is in bankruptcy, so it would be silly to try and file one.
I think, much like with criminal justice advocates in 2020, a lot of people find it difficult to believe that a lot of housing advocates sincerely think that all housing should be taken out of the market, that nobody should have their rent raised or be evicted, ever, for any reason, and that government should use regulations to make housing so unprofitable that it'll go out of the market.
Now, this is both unworkable as a matter of US law around takings and the actual record of tenants running their own buildings (Surfside, Fla. et al), not to mention others, but these are the people who wrote the rent laws that Cuomo signed and are behind Mamdani's housing platform.
You could just tell from Mamdani’s career and campaign that he is a smart competent person, which is not the vibe you get from some other progressive politicians. So I was optimistic on those grounds. I think that’s something that progressives should pay more attention to rather than just ideological positioning.
Every time he gets questioned about "if government grocery stores/free buses failed everywhere else why do you propose them" he responds with a word salad mostly around the idea of "we need to try and learn from our failures", which might not be the best response to the question?
The guy lost one of his hands waving from a helicopter at a man in Africa he thought looked just like a black version of his high school football coach.
OK, I don't have much, if any, of Hamm's appearances memorized. The clip I posted was the top result I got for a search for "John Hamm 30 Rock" on YouTube.
Mamdani keeps talking about things that are literally outside of his jurisdiction. Like, he was talking about World Cup tickets recently. There is no World Cup game in New York City. There are some in East Rutherford, but Mamdani isn't mayor of East Rutherford, and unlike Eric Adams, doesn't live in New Jersey. Maybe all of his fans really care about New Jersey. But it just seems weird to me he spends so much time talking about things he has no control over.
I think this criticism is true of Israel/Palestine but I don't hate an ability to converse about something culturally relevant. Now unfortunately in your example it was soccer, which we all know was invented by European ladies to keep them busy while the men did the cooking, but maybe he can segue into paying attention to sports people like.
I have trouble understanding how mankind’s most popular sport is one that devalues the utility of the opposable thumb. It’s a glorified version of the three-legged race.
I feel like, "Gee, sports tickets have gotten ridiculously expensive lately" is just good, relatable content for the median voter, regardless of whether he can do anything about it.
If the stadia are being sold at capacity (as owners / teams are incented to ensure) then the price makes literally no difference except inasmuch as it might change the composition of attendees based on whatever alternative rationing mechanism is in place.
But I thought we were talking about as a matter of political rhetoric. The number of people who might feel they’re being priced out of sports tickets might be greater than the number who would actually get to go (or would actually choose to go) if prices were lower.
I, an upper middle class voter, have been priced out of professional sports attendance - or at least more frequent professional sports attendance. I'm probably not a representative sample, though. I'm in Cleveland, and we used to go to multiple NBA and MLB games each season, but have whittled that down to just a couple. Also had to reduce MLS attendance (in Columbus). I guess I'm technically priced out of NFL games, but we're talking about the Browns, so price is probably a lot lower on the list of reasons not to go...
There is the European solution to this: increase the supply.
There are more tickets sold to professional association football games in the UK on the average in-season weekend than to NFL games; this is entirely because there are only 32 NFL teams and therefore only 16 games, whereas there are about 120 professional teams in England/Wales and 40-50 in Scotland. The stadiums are smaller, but the top 16 games are over half the size.
Of course English games are cheaper: there are about 50% more tickets in a country (England) about a seventh the population of the US.
I have a suspicion that college football tickets are quite a bit cheaper (on average, ie including the student section and including teams outside the Power Four conferences).
Since we're talking New York, it has two NFL teams.
London (a city of comparable size) has sixteen professional (association) football teams, of which seven are currently in the Premier League.
There are around 30 other semi-professional teams (ie ones that pay their players, but not enough for it to be their sole employment)
I'm more refrring to the median NY voter, since that's Mamdani's focus. Given the NY metro area has 2 NBA teams, 2 NFL teams, 3(?) NHL teams, 2 MLB teams and numerous major college programs, it's almost certainly more than zero. And if they aren't, price is probably why.
If the median socialist was more like Mamdani, I'd be significantly less skeptical of the whole project. Even just as rhetoric - the man can talk! I might not agree with all his views, but also he doesn't sound like some dumbass freshman who just took Comparative Continental Philosophy and Its Discontents 101 and whinges on endlessly about dialectic superstructure, man. Being able to translate finicky high-falutin' ivory ideas - whether it's neoliberal wonkery or obtuse Engels - into language that the masses can understand is a rare skill. If he manages to walk the walk too, all the better! Falling backwards into "huh, it looks like regulations hurt small businesses more than large ones" is a promising sign indeed. Somehow I'll - make a libertarian - out of you. Same with going YIMBY and (hopefully) not larding it down with social housing this, 100% affordable units that. A community imput here, a neighborhood character here, and sooner or later you're talking about real regulatory constraints. There's so many examples of progressive ideas that could lead to left-abundance, on paper, that keep failing due to poor execution; if Mamdani can stick the landing for a few, that's great for New York City, and also for setting a higher bar elsewhere. There's a lot of ruin in dense blue metros...
(Not sure what he has against Frigidaire though - they do make quality rugged iceboxes. Who'd want to buy a refrigerator from a company called Warmth?)
I think this article is insane copium. His staffing decisions do not point to moderation which is really the only actionable thing to judge him on.
He’s appointed a tenant rights czar who has been very explicit in wanting to find ways to expropriate property. His administration is advocating a housing system that makes it functionally impossible for any building owner of rent stabilized housing to remain solvent. He has very deliberately not mentioned NYCHA’s constant problems with terrible conditions, illegal subletting, and nuisance tenants.
He’s repeatedly made clear his intention on criminal justice is to push the same failed progressive ideologies that allow all sorts of quality of life crimes to continue with minimal or no punishment.
He has made zero overtures to making improvements to the education system that would keep middle or upper middle class families from fleeing NYC schools if they can’t afford private.
He has made zero overtures to examining the web of nonprofit vendors that make up over 15% of the city’s budget.
If you want to know someone's overarching vision, listen to their words. As you noted: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."
I read the whole transcript and that weird statement wasn't as Stalinist as it appears but it was stupidly clumsy. Best I can tell, he was talking about the importance of New York's various ethnic communities and how they can come together to all be New Yorkers:
"They will be Russian Jewish immigrants in Brighton Beach, Italians in Rossville, and Irish families in Woodhaven . . . Few of these eight and a half million will fit into neat and easy boxes. Some will be voters from Hillside Avenue or Fordham Road who supported President Trump a year before they voted for me. . . And if for too long these communities have existed as distinct from one another, we will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it. Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from, the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers."
Cea Weaver sure is getting ratioed on X for her assertion (link below) that homes will be a "collective good"...especially if you are White. I guess every civic leader is entitled to one screwball advisor.
I should have put it better above. It's not in the X link given, but I shouldn't have said it in a way that suggested she didn't say it in other contexts.
On January 1 he held a press conference at a privately-owned rent stabilized building and called the landlord a slumlord and a speculator. Then today in court they filed an intervention into the bankruptcy and said it shouldn't be sold to a private operator because ‘the current rents are very-low averaging’ and too many of the apartments under regulated. They are arguing for the bankruptcy sale to be halted and the city to begin an in rem proceeding to take the 5,100 unit portfolio.
Meanwhile on Sunday, he praised a nonprofit building in the Bronx with a government regulatory agreement, and pays no taxes, as a success story. The nonprofit building has 58% more immediately hazardous violations (rats, mice, walls caving in) then the bankrupt building he criticized. The buildings also have roughly the same amount of debt. $110k per unit for the bankrupt building and $99k for the nonprofit with government backing.
So it is clear the agenda is not better housing conditions for tenants. It is ending private ownership. At least in his first week in office.
Mayor’s office can continue to over tax older rent-regulated buildings and increase water and sewer costs — and freeze rents — that will accelerate default and now they will intervene in bankruptcies and foreclosures to prevent transfer to new private ownership.
He will run out of gov’t budget money soon though.
I suppose he could do emergency repairs to the property and then placing a lien on it for the expense, but that only encumbers a transfer to new ownership. It doesn't prevent it.
> The Upper East Side was a stronghold of anti-Mamdani voting and is very transit-oriented.
This is not well known, but we have a transit field in our bodies and when you step out you swivel to orient yourself along the nearest subway line. And then you bobble towards the station and board a train. Whether you wanted to or not.
I wonder what devices you could power with the currents induced in the transit-oriented New Yorkers by the transit field? Do the New Yorkers generate their own field? They probably have a short-range force of repulsion between them.
Gradually Matt is coming around to the realization that the left is the only possible vehicle for YIMBY ideas in American politics and he'll have to join us on team Sewer Socialism. :)
I think Matt has mostly been skeptical that there *is* a sewer socialist team in American politics. The concern being that the Left will deliver housing abundance the way California has delivered high speed rail.
I think the mainstream of the CA Democrats is the mainstream of the national party; they supplied the 2024 nominee and the current 2028 polling leader.
I'm not sure how that changes the question. Do you not consider the mainstream of the Democratic party to be the left, especially after the party has moved to the left significantly over the last 20 years?
There's a sense in which the Democratic party is the left party in the US, but by "the left" I specifically meant the left wing faction in politics (Bernie, AOC, Mamdani, etc).
I think there's been some miscalibration on this because the fights in California have built a strong association between YIMBY and "moderates", but the "moderate" faction in San Francisco is well to the left of, say, Andrew Cuomo.
In general, 'moderates' in the Democratic party, as I think Matt is noticing a lot more recently, represent the interests of small-c conservative homeowners, which makes them a poor vehicle for YIMBY.
Matt has written about how Houston actually isn't the YIMBY paradise people say. I think in practice urbanism via Republicans will be harder to accomplish than it seems.
"He is promising concrete deregulatory measures to help small businesses thrive. It’s just straightforward, moderate pro-business politics facilitated by some ideological fudging."
The Democratic Party needs to adopt this measure and incorporate an 'abundance' style attitude towards small business growth. I see this becoming especially more important as market concentration and economic power increasingly are housed within the top ten largest companies. This is getting slightly off topic but the U.S. is basically putting all its eggs into the A.I. basket; spurring small business growth by cutting red tape would be a way to help diversify the tax base and incentivize investment in local businesses if the demand surrounding A.I. is slow going or even fails to take off.
As an early anti-anti-Mamdani poster here— and specifically somebody who held that view because I recognized that he was pragmatic and willing to embrace housing abundance— I feel pretty vindicated by how things played out.
Mamdani "has remained uncompromisingly progressive on Palestine." Should I really care what the mayor of New York's stance is on this issue? Is that part of his job description? What does he think about Ukraine? Who does he think will win the Super Bowl?
It's at least noteworthy that the Israeli government cares a lot about what the New York mayor's stance is, and has a lot to say about it. So maybe it does matter, even if we don't care.
If the Prime Minister of Israel is not comfortable visiting the city in the world with the largest Jewish and Israeli diaspora because of fear of arrest, that’s a very good reason to care
As I recall, he has good reason to fear being in Israel due to arrest, trial, or conviction on criminal charges there too - it's a major problem having a criminal as a leader!
To be fair, Eric Adams spent a lot of time on this issue as well. In general, you’re absolutely right about this. The more time Mamdani spends on this, the worse a mayor he will be.
It also helps that he has that quality that makes you want to root for him. There’s something attractive about his youth that allows you to see him evolving in front of you. Apparently, yesterday he name checked a transportation Vital City writer when he was asked about streetscape during Congestion Price celebration. There is an openness that draws people in.
The other thing is that while Zohran is super woke he doesn’t seem preachy like he is looking down on you for not agreeing with him. AOC can never fully pivot but she can learn from Zohran on how to deal with skeptics on both culture & econ. He avoids evincing resentment towards either the rich (Bernie) or the culturally conservative (AOC).
Unlike many DSA types, Mamdani really does seem fluent with what the wonky publications are saying. When I met him during my reporting trip last year on the campaign, he seemed to know what Slow Boring was!
[In Mamdani voice] "The key to winning people over: joke with the men, flirt with the women, tell media people you like their substacks. Works every time."
Big deal. Tell me that his response was, "Oh, the Matt Yglesias Substack? Well, yes I completely agree that Politik bedeutet ein starkes langsames Bohren von harten Brettern, as Max originally said" and I'll be moderately impressed.
The newsletter or the Weber essay?!
Newsletter!
Maybe he even has an account and joins us in the comment section surreptitiously!
Man, I hope his nom de plume isn't Barry J Kaufman DO.
I'm thinking Das P is more plausible.
To a certain extent, the degree to which he can be successful depends on how much he separates himself from the DSA since they're not exactly the wonkiest bunch focused on actual nuts-and-bolts governance.
He navigated the Bulwark interview really well. Dude has skills.
Though he muffed the Palestine issue, and it went viral, so maybe not? I haven't followed closely but my sense is he's not inflaming it currently.
"He doesn't seem preschy like he is looking down on you for not agreeing with him." If more "progressives" in the past decade or so had been willing and able to do that, Trump wouldn't be where he is.
I think the largest untold political shift was when the left become the party of scolds, that used to be the republicans.
What I still can’t believe (you’re completely right) how much of a compromise voters were willing to make to teach the scolds a lesson.
I know of at least one who was a lifelong democrat who switched and professed it was the scolding. But I also think it was more to do with Republicans being the party of flexible ethics (he liked the party of the resolute desk blowjob).
...and turns out it's still the Republicans. That the progs seemed to forget why the evangelicals lost the culture war is exasperating.
Totally agree, to me and again this is anecdotal, we lost the messaging war about this. Most of my lib friends like me, even far left friends, at the end of the day really don't actually care that much what other people are doing it's just that they are drowned out by the posters. The right still really wants to judge you, it's just those evangelicals never signed up for twitter.
I think you've hit on it. I mean, the man charmed Trump.
Nobody likes a scold and Mamdani doesn't shake his finger. He nods, smiles, and persuades. He even seems to listen.
Lest I sound like a hopeless fangirl, I remain detached and observant. I've been sorely burned by charming politicians before, so we will see what happens.
I think you're being a bit unfair on AOC. For example, she started out when she first came to national prominence as a lefty NIMBY and has clearly if not fully embraced at least become more open to YIMBY. Having said that she also very flashily came out to rally for Jamal Bowman, possibly the poster child (at least to me) of really bad lefty ideas for education. So will give this a sort of "thumbs sideways" review.
But the other part. I really really don't think you can overlook the gender issue here as far as people's embrace of Zohran vs AOC. It's at least got to be part of any discussion here. That and the banal answer that Zohran's been a national figure for a much shorter length of time then AOC (your realize she's been a congresswoman for 8 years now right? She's actually not really the fresh face anymore). Point being, he's got a lot of time to generate a record that can be picked apart.
Doesn’t his foreign seemingness and her gender cancel each other out? But I take your point. I do think Zohran is more talented tho. He does moderation more gracefully and elegantly than AOC. He even manages criticism from his own left base better.
When confronted about crushing Chi Osse’s primary ambitions, he told leftist YouTubers like Majority Report that “of course leftists should hold him accountable, good faith people can disagree, it was a difficult decision and he understands where people are coming from.” AOC, on the other hand, gets v defensive and takes it personally. She handled the shitstorm over iron dome funding by hiding away from her position and imo gaslighting people by saying they were misunderstanding her. Ofc she was right about her stance but Zohran has a much softer touch imo
I’m willing to bet that AOC will do worse than Harris among men in any national election because of her annoying personality.
AOC isn’t annoying, but Dems should stop running women for president unless there’s someone with just 99th percentile charisma in the running and there isn’t anyone close to that
I have no idea what type of woman could win a presidential election here.
I used to think an American Margaret Thatcher might be a possibility but even that seems remote to me now.
Hillary wasn't far off but she definitely had a lot of political baggage and certainly not a charismatic person. I think a popular governor of a swing state would do well, regardless of gender.
She was a “basket of deplorables” gaffe away from winning, IMO.
I think Dems should not run a female candidate for president until after the GOP has elected a female president. That's what I think it would take to break the barrier.
Maybe the best thing would be to forget about the “barrier” and judge candidates as individuals instead of identities. Worry about ensuring equal opportunity for regular people and let politicians find a way to achieve their ambitions.
If Ann Richards were still alive I could see that, maybe, but we don’t make ‘em like we used to
Ann Richards was great on King of the Hill!
I've been saying for a while that the first female president will be republican - do you not believe that? Do you think the sexism that infects a lot of right-leanining ideologies makes that unlikely? I just figure someone pretty, with big boobs, who loves GAWD, GUNS, and AMERICA and is or talks like they barely graduated middle school but is also an evil bastard.
I think Nikki Haley would do well. In a normal timeline, she would have been the 2024 R candidate.
I always thought Jennifer Granholm would have had a good shot if she was native born
Michigan's governors always seem to fizzle out on the national stage.
Perhaps I didn't make it clear that I wasn't doing a poll. I find her annoying.
That just sounds like someone being a normal politician, telling his audiences what they want to hear regardless of whether he intends to follow through.
Most politicians in this country don’t have these skills. That’s why he stood out in spite of terrible socialist policies during his campaign.
Most absolutely do, otherwise they wouldn't be able to get elected and reelected in the first place. Mamdani barely mustering more than 50% of the vote in deep-blue NYC during the election with Trump as president isn't really suggestive of some impressive political skillset.
I wish we had more politicians on both sides barely mustering 50% in safe seats. Being able to do that is its own form of skill - it means he knew exactly how far he can push things without losing. (I know, he wasn't going to lose when Sliwa got 7%, but he couldn't count on Sliwa staying in the race)
Or he's just not a very good politician.
He spent much of the campaign walking back unpopular policies that he previously supported, like defunding the police to try to gain broader appeal.
He gambled that older residents and homeowners don't have as much power now as they used to, and he was right. He redefined politics in NYC along a different axis than the traditional red-blue axis. Clearly he's not a bad politician. Even if you don't like him, you underestimate him to your peril.
Sliwa should have won!
How exactly would he manage that? 7% isn't exactly close to winning.
"Barely mustering 505 in deep-blue NYC"? Dude, he was running against another Democrat! He mustered 50% against another Democrat.
Cuomo was running as a disgraced, deeply unpopular independent who had the backing of Trump and Elon and multiple GOP donors, while Mamdani was the Democratic nominee and had the full backing of the Democratic Party.
That is flat out false. Many prominent NY Democrats refused to endorse him.
So, I think you're both right, but defining politician differently. If you mean 'can win in a close inter-party race' I think Sam's right. If you mean, 'can win an intra-party fight to get a safe seat,' I think Siddhartha's right. The thing about Mamdani is he ran a competitive campaign in a safe seat.
I’m defining political skills more generally - being able to answer questions, have a conversation, being likable/charismatic, etc. The vast majority of politicians do not have those skills. He has a lot of baggage in terms of his background and policies, which would make him unelectable in most places. Those are not related to his political skills. The political skills lie in being able to downplay his past comments.
Eh, in my experience, being able to answer hard questions from the public, and do press interviews well are skills that most folks winning in actually competitive inter-party elections have to some degree? Where you see disasters are in folks who either are running doomed campaigns, or who got to their spot via intra-party politics, rather than convincing voters?
I’ll let you cope with your delusions on your own.
What delusions?
I don't know, neither Clinton (Hilary, not Bill) nor Harris could quite keep the scold out of their messaging.
He *does* project a winning personality, but I very much want politicians to focus on *doing things* rather than opining on things outside of their purview. Telling audiences what they want to hear is a big part of what got us to this point, IMO.
I'm no socialist, but as a YIMBY and someone who favors non-car transportation, I'm over the moon about what Mamdani is already DOING.
He also plainly just loves the city, and loves city life. He has a sunny vibe of "This is a wonderful place and we can fix our problems." It's great to have an NYC mayor who likes it there.
I feel like you unwittingly made the case for why new fresh faces taking power is actually pretty important to a functioning democracy.
You’re note about how in DC it’s the younger council members who are more YIMBY is instructive. You’ve touched on this before but I think it’s really underemphasized how much the YIMBY/NIMBY divide is an old vs young thing and not a right vs left thing.
I think about our last two presidents and how much their mental mindset of the world was basically set in the 70s and 80s. For Biden, it meant supporting old school unions like Dock Workers when it wasn’t all that clear this is a group worth supporting anymore given realities of modern technology. It also meant treating the Presidency as a senate majority leader straight out of the late 80s and early 90s which is likely how you got “the groups” getting too much influence* (that and it seems like his focus was extremely foreign policy oriented which meant domestic concerns kind of feel by the wayside).
For Trump it’s almost a cartoonish version of this. I still think “protect the housewives of Long Island” is an underrated window into his worldview. I feel like David Roth nailed this when he noted that somewhere around 1990 Trump’s brain turned to goo and he became incapable of learning anything new. Hence is late 80s obsession with tariffs never changing.
I think in cities it’s a little bit different but has similar dynamics of council members winning in uncompetitive elections and basically protecting in the desires of various interest groups that got their ear years maybe decades prior (guessing this how absurd rules around building scaffolding in NYC manage to stay around. Zohran that’s a good one to tackle).
So all in all. Somewhat tongue in cheek, I guess I’m calling for “Gallego 2028”.
* in fairness, Biden’s long time in the senate probably did help pass more bills than expected. We sort of forget how much more legislatively successful his term was than we expected. But it still sort of came about because of Biden’s ability to play on sort of the last vestiges of how senate worked 30 years ago instead of tackling the inert institution it’s become today.
Great comment. The grip of the gerontocracy is strong and explains both the sense of political stasis, the strong risk-averse behavior, and rising discontent from younger citizens.
I've noted before UK is almost a "sneak preview" of political developments in America right down to "Brexit" happening due to similar dynamics driving Trump's 2016 victory.
Big one I note all the time is UK's median age is higher than the US, so a lot of fights over pensions and NIMBY has a ton to do with aging Pensioners who own their "council flats" and younger generations being left out (the age skew of voting in UK at least until recently (we'll see how much the rise of the Reform Party change this dynamic) is even more pronounced than in the US*. Can't be emphasized enough how much the Tory Party remained in power for so long based on the votes of people over 65).
The extreme NIMBYism in UK has some pretty unique UK aspects for sure (much smaller country for one so land is more of a premium. The green belt around London which is especially important since London basically is the UK economy. A much more (depressingly) "back in the good ole days" mindset than in US likely having to do with some weird overhang of the downfall of British Empire (this is some real psychoanalyzing on my part, but my hypothesis is there is something to this)). But the big one just like in US is the old vs young dynamic.
* I will repeat to the cows come home, but if only Gen Z voted, Harris wins the Presidency by pretty comfortable margin. Not a landslide but definitely comfortable. The whole "Gen Z is super right wing" narrative was kind of garbage from the beginning. I think it's correct to say that a lot of commentary assuming "Gen Z" would be super left or demonstrably more left that Millennials was also likely bunk. But that's demonstrably different than saying "Gen Z" is right wing. I actually though this slate piece was illuminating. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/gen-z-manosphere-millennials-progressive-trump.html. It's illuminating to me because it unintentionally shows much media is still beholden to the idea that Gen Z men are right wing. I look at this and think "So Gen Z are less racists than older generations and basically have the same gender views as Millennials. So on net, more culturally left than older generations". Instead what it shows (to me) is younger men with mores sexist attitudes sorting into the GOP. Like, not good! Especially since these will be the backbone of GOP in 10-20 years. But also very different then saying Gen Z men overall are more sexist.
It's interesting I had always thought that the big battle to save social security in its current structure in the W Bush days was vindicated by the financial crisis. Now I wonder in light of lower fertility if we haven't locked ourselves in on entitlements in such a manner that virtually guarantees an even worse crisis over the next 25-30ish years, as boomers draw on entitlements that in their minds they earned for far longer than passed generations, with fewer young adults than ever entering the work force. The youngest of them are only just now getting into their 60s and it's fully plausible that they will vote in a bloc and cling to power in a manner that prevents structural reforms until my kids (Gen Alphas) are getting towards their 30s. Unless AI robots usher in a true paradigm shifting level of productivity that can be redistributed in a manageable way we could really be putting our fingers on the scale towards our own decline.
This is probably a bigger deal than whatever partisan alignment looks like 20 years from now. However I wouldn't necessarily be so sanguine on that either, just because the Zoomers edged for Harris. I'd like to think my sons will see through the nonsense of the MAGA if that type of conservatism remains ascendant but I have no idea why they'd support Democrats if the trajectory doesn't change significantly.
In the specific case of Social Security, I think it's right to be worried that given an aging population and given the diminishing amount of money in the Social Security Trust Fund* some sort of Social Security reform is likely necessary...and that the 2005 attempt at Social Security reform was a terrible way of going about it, which I think was vindicated by the 2008 crash (if private accounts have been introduced earlier or if the final bill included provisions for people close to retirement or just retired to put their money fully in the market, the recession may have been actually depression 2.0 given how much that would hurt the purchasing power of retirees. Setting aside the moral stain of passing a policy that put a bunch of retirees in poverty basically unnecessarily).
Much better in my view to raise the payroll tax cap. I'll tell you from personal experience how jarring it was when my salary reached a particular level and seeing how at some point during the year, my paycheck was demonstrably larger than the last one kind of randomly. It really hit home to me how absurd the cap is. Like, why am I receiving this financial windfall?
*One thing that is worth noting is right wing propaganda is very very dishonest about this. Read enough think pieces about the trust fund from right wing sources and you'd think Social Security will be literally bankrupt by 2030 which is not even close to being true. Think there is a world of difference between "we need to reform social security so it doesn't become too burdensome to the finances of the US government" (pretty sure this is Matt's position) and "we need to eliminate social security entirely because we are in thrall to a) some old testament view of poverty, b) a deranged commitment to finding any way to put more money in rich people's pockets and c) a pathological antipathy to welfare state generally".
I think it's very very important to note that 2005 social security private accounts was going to be part of a longer term plan to unravel social security entirely.
Sure and to be clear I wasn't endorsing the particulars about the specific policy prescriptions at issue in 2005. What I'm worried about is that age demographics and voting patterns (plus of course the general brain melting effect MAGA has had on the GOP) have put us in a place where it isn't even politically possible to have the sane version of the conversation. In that regard at least we may be worse off than we were back then.
I can’t say I don’t enjoy the extra money in my paycheck, but I’d happily give it up if:
- The cap was removed entirely.
- People who make over a certain amount in non-payroll income are made to contribute to the fund as if they made at least some reasonable percentage of their income from payroll income.
"Much better in my view to raise the payroll tax cap. I'll tell you from personal experience how jarring it was when my salary reached a particular level and seeing how at some point during the year, my paycheck was demonstrably larger than the last one kind of randomly. It really hit home to me how absurd the cap is. Like, why am I receiving this financial windfall?"
Aah yes. That terrible feeling when you get a bigger paycheck. That's the worst. /s
The oldest Boomers started turning 80 this year, which is the point at which turnout starts to drop rapidly (both through death and through disability which makes voting sufficiently difficult that they stop voting).
Until now, the people dropping out of the retired-people voting bloc were mostly Silents (a smaller generation), they should be majority-Boomers starting from about this year. For a few years, that'll stabilise the retired voter numbers, but then in about 2030, the people retiring will be Gen X (another small generation), and the retired voting bloc will be falling as Boomers die or lose the ability to vote and smaller numbers of Xers retire to replace them. Obviously, if people live longer that will compensate to some degree, but the differences in cohort size are substantial (and life expectancy, while still rising, is doing so very slowly now).
The aging dynamics are, of course, long-term towards an older population. But medium-term they run in the opposite direction because of cohort effects.
I hear what you're saying but it's not like younger people are going to be in stasis while this is happening, and doubly so if the government is being primarily run by older people whose interests continue to align more with the 80+ year olds dying or dropping out of the electorate for other reasons. We're already getting some previews of what it looks like when the state is geared more towards the interests of empty nester retirees than prime age working people with families. It isn't good, particularly to the extent the entire system operates on the assumption of the continued creation of new prime age working people with families.
Oh, I’m not disagreeing with you.
I’m just saying that the prime age working people will be a bigger share of the overall electorate in 10-20 years time than they are now, so there may be some amelioration of this.
[Or, put it another way, the bias in favour of pensioners will switch off the moment Gen X retires, because Gen X always gets screwed by every generational change]
If we got rid of the internet we’d see a lot more, and healthier, family formation
God willing. They better not touch social security until every last Xennial is dead
I'm operating under the assumption that when the trust is no longer able to pay out at 100% under current funding, something that will occur a mere 7 years from now, the first thing they'll do is raise the retirement age and the second thing they'll do is start some kind of phased in means testing scheme... beginning with the youngest Xers. Sadly if I'm certain about anything it's that those at age will ultimately shuffle off their mortal coils with a bar tab left for us and our kids.
The first thing they should do is raise the salary cap, then they should raise the money elsewhere, ideally from noncitizens, but it’s ok to just print it too. We should be lowering, not raising, the retirement age, particularly when AI related job loss is on the horizon
Why would we want to reduce benefits for the old? Those are our parents! That money gets passed down to us!
Older people tend to lean more conservative, as they die they are replaced by new older people that also now lean conservative.
I agree with your view of UK "previewing" USA politics.
And even older European countries (like Italy), reach the same status even earlier.
Think of Berlusconi as the blueprint for Boris Johnson and Trump, and he even had the Putin connection before anybody else.
Perhaps we should revive the British Empire.* All the cool kids are doing it these days, and it’s not like most other countries are doing a great job of running themselves or anything. Rule Brittania!
*start with the US pls
Old politicians can often hold dumb, unproductive ideas.
They are often matched in this by young politicians.
Hence why it's a good idea to have a mixture of both. Or maybe more importantly have a mixture of both in positions of power. Democrats and GOP obviously have a number of younger politicians. But the former has a leadership that's dominated by very old members (or at least was through end of Biden administration) and the latter is currently a cult around a 79 year old man who can't stay awake and seems to be deteriorating by the day.
Why tongue in cheek?
I think Gallego is the Democrats' best choice.
He’s too valuable in the senate holding that AZ seat. Ditto Mark Kelly.
If he wins the White House that justifies whatever risk we face with that Senate seat. If he doesn't win the nomination (or heaven forbid loses in the general) then he's still a Senator.
I don’t know much about Gallego, but I haven’t seen another Democrat that comes close to being as good a candidate as Mark Kelly. And luckily for us, Hegseth is pissing him off enough he might put his hat in the ring
I like Kelly. Maybe a little dull but just a solid good guy.
Gallego has a lot going for him. Comes from a poor broken family, got to Harvard and then went to the heart of the fighting in Iraq leading a Marine unit. Latino male who despises "Latinx" wokeness and yet leads the charge against the Stephen Millers running our government right now. Excellent policy ideas on climate and energy* while also teaching us about how young males want their "big ass truck." Comes from a swing state (like Kelly of course) and knows how to defeat a polished but empty Republican blowhard, in his case Kari Lake.
Also, 15 years younger than Kelly (who again I like!) After 12 years of Trump/Biden/Trump, the younger the better.
*https://www.volts.wtf/p/sen-ruben-gallego-has-a-new-energy
But is he an astronaut?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/john-glenn-cautionary-tale-214510/
Isn't he short though? That seems important for a presidential candidate.
Gallego and Mark Kelly. Shame that they’re both from Arizona, but that may not be too bad
Following the Constitution is for the little people.
Why would Gallego/Kelly violate the constitution?
The ticket can't be from the same state.
I didn’t know that
Hence my qualifier "somewhat". I actually do think Gallego is a real viable possibility in 2028 and I've liked what I've seen of him so far.
The "tongue in cheek" comment is just me noting that we have a long long long way to go before 2028. I find it incredible how many pundits talk as though Gavin Newsome has the nomination sewn up (including Matt). If the "hot" candidate 3 years out from an election had some consistent track record of being the nominee than we would have President Mario Cuomo in 1992 and candidate Scott Walker in 2012.
I still have fond memories of the Rudy Giuliani administration after his 2008 victory.
My default preference is a Governor over a Senator because that's closer to the job profile. Purely based on who can do the job better, I would prefer Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, Gretchen Whitmer, Jared Polis or Roy Cooper over any Senator or a blue state Governor. Any Senator or Wes Moore/Gavin Newsom are Tier 2 candidates.
I'm not sure I see the case you are aiming for. Fresh faces do not, in and of themselves, mean anything?
Experience, we would like to think, helps a ton. But in cooperation based activities, the desired trait is almost certainly a neutrality to everyone you will be bringing to the table. As well as an honest field in which to bring people there. That is, the most neutral and likeable agent in the world can't help if there is an active desire to wreck things from someone.
In that last case, you need someone that has political capital that they can spend to influence things. In fact, I think I would probably cede that political capital is far more important than experience in leadership. It always enacts a cost to get people to agree with things you want them to do. If you are lucky, it is more costly for people to defect from your lead than it is for them to follow. If you have windfalls from your decisions, this compounds.
Yeah, one nice thing about Mamdani is that he isn't in his 70s. Gerontocracy is nptor working out so well for the country, IMO.
This "billionaire positivity" thing, as just being some natural outgrowth of "respecting the profit motive" is a huge bait and switch.
The profit motive can lead to many things. It can lead to good products sold for cheap. It can lead to Thai fishermen enslaving Burmese migrants so they can cheaply harvest trash fish for shrimp farms. Both of those are logical outcomes of people acting according to a motive to maximize profit.
As the famous quip on reddit goes, "Once you reach $999,999,999, we give you a plaque that says, “congratulations, you won capitalism,” and we name a dog park after you."
You never addressed the basic public effects of having a group of people with massive fortunes on the wider polity.
Why did we use to have an estate tax? It was partially because we as Americans looked over at Europe and thought, "Man, it's bad that there is this class of landed nobility who just inherited all their wealth and then crowd out other people's access to land, money, and opportunities."
The piece that you wrote made a good case that most billionaires "earned" their wealth in the sense that they did something novel for it. They aren't princes inheriting estates. But it was rather like reading a defense of monarchy where the defense rests on the idea that "Actually, this new batch of kings successfully intrigued/fought to seize the throne rather than inherit it, so this basic autocrat - peasant relationship should not be complained about."
I would be very curious to hear what Matthew Yglesias thinks the relationship between money and political speech and the entire information ecosystem should be. The billionaire piece didn't really answer it.
You ask, "Why did we use to have an estate tax?"
We still do. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/estate-tax
Frank Luntz and the creation of the term "death tax" as a way to con people into believing that the estate tax was illegitimate is one of the great messaging coups of the 90's. I know we still have an estate tax, but the threshold has been raised very high and it is easy to get around.
but we're talking about billionaires, right? so the threshold isnt that big of a deal; 15 million is only 1.5% of a billion
Rich people inheriting millions is a concern too if the issue is as OP put it “it's bad that there is this class of landed nobility who just inherited all their wealth and then crowd out other people's access to land, money, and opportunities.” $15 million are still much more than what most people could make in their whole career (it’s $375k for 40 years, which is really more like $700k pretax! And you have to discount to present value which makes it even more), and it crowds out things like housing explaining why the price-income ratio is so high for housing—people are not only using current income to pay for it.
Your math is extremely, extremely off on account of missing compounding returns from investing. This is somewhat unrealistic but you can do it in Excel in five minutes: If you assume that someone starts with 0, saves $21000 a year every year for 40 years of working, which compounds at a 7% rate of return, then retires and lives for another 20 years without drawing down those savings, which continue to compound at 7%, then you get to $15.2 million by year 60. I recognize that $21000 a year is a lot to save for a lot of people, but we’re talking a fairly normal middle-class level of savings, not an investment banker level of savings.
I'm confused how they're living in retirement without drawing down those savings. Isn't that what those savings are for? If they're retired and not working, what are they living on?
At retirement in your scenario, they have something like $5M.
It's so powerful that I instinctively went to correct you that it's $210,000, not $21,000, but no you're correct that it's $21k. Which again, is not a small amount but also within the realm of a normal middle-class level of savings.
This is a bit of an exaggeration given that for most people, rich people very much included, most wealth is capital appreciation. If you assume someone starts working at 22, works until 72 and immediately dies, they'd need to save ~$75000 a year at a 7% real rate of return.
You absolutely have to be rich to afford that, but it's an order of magnitude less than you're claiming.
Yeah but the guy that inherited $15m is going to be appreciating even faster than you due to starting with a higher base. If they earn 5% and get $750,000 for free it’s extremely rare to earn that high salary. Capital appreciation makes it even harder for wage-earners to catch up to heirs.
It's also a lot less than the Minister of Information got from building her fake university and the sale of her blog. Being born a millionaire is benign by comparison.
People with that kind of money put their bequests in the form of trusts and in that way avoid estate taxation.
so you agree with me that the threshold is unimportant
See the "easy to get around" part of the equation.
Luntz would like you to think that. But from my research, the term "death tax" wasn't all that important. The estate tax repeal movement took off (and, for a while, won) because they had
(1) a hard core of highly motivated true believers (like Harold Apolinksy)
(2) a potent moral argument ("double taxation" is unfair)
(3) an effective reframing ("it's not about billionaires, it's family farms!")
(4) an opposition that was weak (unions) and indecisive (life insurance, charity)
and finally
(5) a highly funded, well-organized network that took many years to build.
Survey evidence suggests that people were more persuaded by the moral argument about unfairness than by the "death" moniker. And the moral argument had another role, according to Shapiro and Graetz: it held the repeal coalition together. When the Democrats offered the farmers a sweetheart carve-out, they refused. It wasn't just about naked self-interest for them anymore. One reflected, How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I sold out?
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691127897/death-by-a-thousand-cuts?srsltid=AfmBOorv8xQInm9rYBoH-5oTrn9R95ZK_AYqq6FcijE0cuLs_8Gy9jnO
PS if you don't want as much detail as the Shapiro/Graetz book, I give a precis in this post: https://bigifftrue.substack.com/p/the-first-order-logic-of-oligarchy
I think there's also the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" aspect to the thinking. "RSN my crypto ship will come in and I will want to pass my billions on to my children."
That money has already been taxed. It should be taxed again because you give it to your kids.
Yeah, I’m of the opinion that all transactions should be taxed, and that we have a responsibility to be prudent with those tax dollars
I agree, Matthew & Helikitty. But that argument was very effective at the time. Look at how W utterly wiped the floor with Gore on the issue.
https://www.c-span.org/clip/presidential-debates/user-clip-bush-gore-debate-the-death-tax/4510389
Part of the problem is that Gore was making a fundamentally wonky, interests-based argument. The tax doesn’t apply to too many people, so it probably won’t hurt you. Meanwhile Bush had a more more emotional, moral argument. The tax is just wrong.
The exemption is $15m and there are trusts to cover amounts beyond that. Tons of people inherit single-digit-millions without paying any tax which is still more than they could make with a lifetime of work paying 40% tax. Thus the high estate tax exemption is still contributing to a society where it matters more how rich your parents were than what you did in your career.
Trusts do not generally let you avoid the gift/estate tax.
Trusts are either revocable (subject to estate tax) or irrevocable (subject to gift tax). They are from a tax standpoint just giving your heirs money as part of your estate or as a gift, respectively.
EDIT: Trusts exist to maintain strict control over money, not avoid taxes.
If I give my 15 year old kid a million dollar gift and tell him "please invest this wisely", that counts against my estate tax exemption and my kid will waste it on cars and booze. If I put that million dollar gift in an irrevocable trust that he gets access to at age 35 and I invest it wisely for him, that also counts against my estate tax exemption but now it'll pay for my grandkids' private school. The tax implications are the same, but my control over the money is greater with a trust.
Really? I thought you could avoid the estate tax altogether with a trust.
Trusts are overwhelmingly about control, not tax evasion.
Trusts are designed to either avoid probate (if revocable) or make a strings-attached gift (if irrevocable). Neither of these lets you avoid estate taxes.
There are some estate-tax-dodging trusts, but the structure is not some magic get-out-of-estate-tax-free thing. The basic idea is: if you know that some asset you own is going to appreciate a lot in the next five years, you can use a special type of trust that lets you transfer just the appreciation (not the principal) to your kid. The IRS and economic theory say that future appreciation is worth just the risk-free interest rate (anything more is already priced in, right?) and so the gift is worth zero. But obviously it's not worth zero, because you have some handy insider info that says it's not.
There are ways you can do roughly this without a trust (using options), but they're dicier from a "will I get audited, and how bad will it be if I lose the audit" standpoint.
There are definitely trusts that let you entirely avoid estate tax, they just require a specific structure.
See my reply to Helikitty -- there are trusts that have estate-tax-dodging features, but they're mostly equivalent to selling your kid a total return swap against some asset you own that you think will appreciate a lot in the near future. It's just that the trust structure is more legally bulletproof / less likely to get you audited.
Spell it out, please. That's not my experience of dealing with estate planners, lawyers, and various trusts.
I would ask Felix Salmon about that. Something he has noted I think at least a couple times is basically no one pays the estate tax given all the various loopholes and ways we've made it possible for people of means to avoid paying the tax.
It's sort of the Holy Roman Empire of taxes; an entity that exists on paper but is functionally irrelevant as an institution/policy.
As I understand it, and I definitely could be wrong, inherited stocks are treated as having not appreciated and the capital gains are ignored, which seems like a huge dodge. I'm sure there are countless other loopholes that make inheritance for the super rich essentially untaxed.
Stocks are valued at fair market value as part of your estate.
Right, to it avoids capital gains. You buy for $10, it appreciates to $100 when you die, and that $90 in profit is never taxed. If you earned that money through non-capital gains means, it would have been taxed as you earned it, and then the inheritor would be taxed on the estate. Death avoids capital gains taxes. It's a huge loophole that lets rich people live on loans against their gains and never pay tax on it.
That's an argument against the step-up basis (which I would be fine getting rid of so long as the capital gains tax is indexed to inflation), not in favor of the estate tax.
They want to get at stepped up basis without doing the legwork to understand how and why. Even Mitt Romney came out against it now. Unsure why it hasn't caught political fire.
I’d like to preface this by saying I’m basically a Maoist when it comes to estate taxes — I think inherited wealth is illegitimate so I’m predisposed to agree with you.
The issue though is that our polity would probably be better if billionaires had more influence over things. Climate change, immigration, tariffs, foreign aid — all are issues that I’d bet you and I agree more with the typical billionaire than the typical populism-poisoned voter.
This is a recent Slow Boring piece that expounds on the idea that big-dollar donors are generally more left-wing then the general public: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-left-is-right-about-the-democrats
This is talking about Democratic Party donors, a very select group, not all rich people.
What would be better is if ”ordinary voters” were better educated and knew what they were voting for as well as some basic facts about the world.
Being better educated is not exactly the same thing as having the characteristics of highly educated people.
What do you mean?
Sending ~80 IQ people to college won't suddently make them critical thinkers.
I’m not super-sure about that last paragraph, at least the most powerful politically active billionaires are Trump followed by Musk and I’d go with the median voter over them.
But also taxes don’t really fall on the average voter; they fall on high-income wage-earners. If estate taxes were higher the overall tax burden could come down and this would predominantly give more resources to high-income wage-earners. ChatGPT says the type of person who pays the highest taxes in the US is “A senior executive, physician, or lawyer earning $500k–$2M+ in salary in California or New York.” Is the average billionaire more liberal than that type of person? That’s more questionable.
We have a deficit close to 2 trillion, so no, tax burden is not coming down on anyone even if the exemption for estate tax is lowered.
Totally agree with your point about the most politically active billionares. It doesn't really matter what the "average billionaire" thinks, but rather the ones who have used their money to be most influential, such as Larry Ellison and Elon Musk. The democrat billionaires like Soros and Bloomberg either got outflanked, or lack interest in pursuing things like "buy twitter and control the internet vibes" or "buy a movie studio and control hollywood vibes"
Unfortunately, the higher income professional class is despised by the left (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/the-hoarding-of-the-american-dream/530481/) and the right (elites!!)
You (or someone) said that before and I responded that, to my understanding, it’s totally wrong and billionaires are, as a class, hard right. Do you have a link showing you’re right and I’m wrong?
None of "climate change, immigration, tariffs, foreign aid" are inconsistent with wanting lower taxes and less spending. (I guess foreign aid is spending, but billionaires are mostly smart enough to know it's a tiny fraction of the total and that the great majority is entitlements).
But I’m saying my understanding is that the billionaire class is quite right wing across the board on these issues. Of course there are exceptions.
I always assumed that was a bit.
Why should the state be able to wipe out a life’s work, after it got through taxing that work during the life? It doesn’t really compute ethically.
What "life"'s work? The dead life? Are treating rich people like Pharaohs where they are buried with all their earthly wealth as if their dead body still has some claim to it?
Taxing dead people is probably more ethical than taxing living ones, all things considered.
As it is, taxing dead people is really a tax on "people who happened to have the right parents" as the heirs didn't do anything to create said accumulated wealth.
No, the only ethical defense I see is taxing the transfer to the new heirs. What’s special about dying that allows the state to tax a dead person? They’ve already had their chances at the apple with the dead person during their life.
It’s a transfer of wealth from one person to another. If your employer transfers wealth to you, you have to pay tax on it. The government already got to tax your employer on the money they made, why do they get to tax it again when the employer gives it to you?
If you want to take the libertarian position that all taxes are theft then fine, but taxing unearned wealth from people who just happened to have rich parents seems much fairer than taxing wealth from people who are actively contributing to society to earn it.
> The government already got to tax your employer on the money they made, why do they get to tax it again when the employer gives it to you?
They don't? Corporate taxes are assessed on profit, which is revenue less expenses. Employee wages are an expense.
(Yes there are nuances and edge cases, but this is certainly the general rule and has been for as long as income taxes have existed)
“The government already got to tax your employer on the money they made, why do they get to tax it again when the employer gives it to you?”
You seem to be conflating income, revenue, and capital.
Yes, that makes sense compared to wiping out estates as general principal.
Ok here's a proposal: you get a 0% tax rate on dead people's estates, I get a 90% tax on alive people inheriting those estates. Win-win.
Why does the state think it is a better steward of that money than the people that built the money?
because it has a better objective function.
The person who inherited it (e.g. not the person who built it, but whatever) is optimizing their own personal happiness. The state would be optimizing for societal goals.
I'm a better steward of money than my broke cousin. That doesn't mean he'd be better off if I took half his paycheck.
The heir is definitionally not the person that built the money.
The people who built the money are dead in this case. Dead people can't be bothered to make decisions at all.
Are you a hard libertarian opposed to all taxation?
If you aren't, and you accept that we need some taxes, why do you think estate taxes on the very rich are *worse* than, say, payroll taxes on the poor?
This is the better way altogether. Just tax inheritances as income, with perhaps a modest standard deduction (say 200% of the value of the median home, so people aren’t normally forced to sell grandma’s house)
why wouldn't we want to force people to sell grandma's house?
Money is the creation of the state and the state is *allowed*, perfectly ethically, to tax 100% of any dollars or property within its borders. It merely chooses not to do so sometimes for very good consequentialist reasons.
With extremely high estate tax rates people will just give their kids big gifts while they're alive.
If the estate tax rate is higher than the top income tax rate, you can just hire your kid to do a no-show job and pay them a zillion dollars for it. And in fact I think this is why the estate tax (40%) is roughly equal to the top income tax bracket (37%).
Gifts above $19k count towards the estate tax limit, for this very reason.
(The tax code *generally* wasn't written by morons)
Read my next sentence after the one you're replying to (you can disguise gifts as, e.g. no-show jobs, and there's a strong incentive to do this if the income tax rate is lower than the gift/estate tax rate).
EDIT: also to be really clear, it doesn't even need to be a no-show job. You can just pay your kid a lot more money than they're actually worth to do a job they're kind of bad at. Plenty of parents already do this without estate tax incentives.
And the kid will pay the top income tax, while with stepped up basis, the gains aren't taxed at all
Let's say I'm the sole owner of a company worth $100 million. I founded the company, so my cost basis is ~$0.
I can give my kid the company in my estate (so he pays 40% of $100 million in estate taxes) or hire him, issue a gazillion new shares, and grant him all of them as RSUs (on which he'd pay 37% in income taxes).
The end result is the same -- he pays ~$40 million in taxes.
“As it is, taxing dead people is really a tax on "people who happened to have the right parents" as the heirs didn't do anything to create said accumulated wealth.”
What does that have to do with anything? At some point in most wealthy people’s history, someone did something remunerative. With this attitude, why aren’t we taxing corporations out of existence that we don’t think are doing anything exciting?
A corporation is an actively existing organization of people who are doing things. It has corporate person hood. People aren't companies. These two things are completely different.
Why should a tobacco company continue to exist? They market death? Their salad days were 60 years ago. Surely the state could make better use of their assets?
Cigarettes are good
A person is completely different than people?
Is your argument that we shouldn't have taxes at all? If not, then can we agree that
1) there need to be some taxes and
2) that without estate taxes, then other taxes have to be higher
3) It seems odd that we would let someone who is getting a large amount of wealth not pay some of it in taxes so that we make people who don't have a lot of wealth pay more in taxes.
A large reason that people work so hard is to give their kids a better life and a head start.
When you nix that you greatly disincentive people from working very similar to an income tax.
And of course that money was already taxed once by the income tax, so you are doubly taxing it causing even further disincentive to the wealth creation in the first place.
I’m kind of surprised to see this line from you—I don’t think of you as dishonest or a demagogue. Taxing is not “wiping out,” and what’s being taxed isn’t the person’s work, but the inheritor’s income. People get taxed on income! It’s like saying, “I get taxed on my income, and then when I purchase something with the income that remains I gotta pay sales tax? Make it make sense!”
There are lots of people in this thread who don’t believe estates should be passed on and are proposing 90% taxes.
I don’t see that in the comment you replied to, maybe I missed it elsewhere (I’m on mobile). I agree that’s a bad idea.
Once the person is dead, why does any one person have a greater claim on their work than any other?
If someone dies intestate with no heir, then their assets escheat to the Sovereign (the Crown or the two bona vacantia Duchies in the UK, the State in the US, or the federal government outside the states). In effect, it passes to the government as a representative of the community as a whole.
Why should an heir or a testator hold a claim that is senior to the community as a whole?
"If someone dies intestate with no heir, then their assets escheat to the Sovereign"
This is only true if the decedent has left no will or other instructions for their estate. If they have, then generally those instructions will followed in the distribution of their assets.
Can I suggest looking up the word “intestate”?
I missed that. That being said, what's the point of your original comment? Were you suggesting that the state should have precedence over heir's or wills and we treat all assets on death the way we do those who are intestate? I have a hard time thinking of a more politically toxic proposal.
Sure, I accept absolutely that this is a really unpopular idea because most people don’t agree with me.
But I’d really like to hear some sort of argument about why any person has any preferential right to the property of a decedent over any other. There seems to be just an assumption that “their kids get their stuff when they die” and I don’t get why. I don’t see how I have any greater claim to my parents’ stuff when they die than anyone else does. I mean, I’ll take the windfall if/when it comes, but if the law changed, I’d shrug my shoulders and move on.
I think we have to step back and see what outcome is better for society rather than contemplate what seems fairest (like the high tax rate post WWII that encouraged investment in manufacturing over paying taxes).
The step up in basis should be eliminated at least. That rule has never made sense to me and I don't think there's any principled justification for it.
As for estate taxes in general, I think they're as legitimate or illegitimate as taxes in general. A lot of the events that we decide are taxable are pretty arbitrary. Why do I pay extra tax on liquor? Why do I pay property tax, sales tax, income tax in some states but not others? Taxation on an estate doesn't seem any more ridiculous than any of this other stuff, and I think it probably has fewer negative repercussions. There's something pretty corrosive about large amount of inherited wealth, both in terms of how its perceived by people in general, and what it does to the recipient -- having met quite a few "lucky" inheritors myself and seeing how it affects their life and personality.
The rich people *that we know of* aren’t princes inheriting estates because there are securities laws requiring you to disclose ownership if you have a large percentage of a public company as founders do.
Someone who inherited a couple million from parents decades or even centuries ago and has just been collecting interest and returns could stay anonymous if they wanted to and there are probably a lot of people who are in that camp—remember people calculated that if Trump had taken his family money in the 70s and just put it in an index fund, he’d be even richer today and would still be a billionaire. Lots of people probably actually did that (it seems like an easy and obvious thing to do) and we just don’t know them.
Maybe less than you're thinking. The first index fund wasn't created until 1976 ;)
/s
"I would be very curious to hear what Matthew Yglesias thinks the relationship between money and political speech and the entire information ecosystem should be. "
Money is speech. You clearly have a 1st amendment right to use your money to promote whatever viewpoint that you want.
Moreover, this is clearly correct. The world doesn't work otherwise. People forget but Citizens United was literally about the government telling people that they couldn't release a movie. Moreover, they argued in court that they could literally stop someone from releasing a book.
There isn't a world that works otherwise. There will always be news companies, or social media companies that can put their thumb on the scale in some manner. And government control over that is WAY worse than the private sector control.
I'd also note that most people who complain about CU clearly haven't read the decision. A few points:
- Nowhere did the Court declare that money is speech, though it observed that money can purchase speech. That was true even at the Founding: Ben Franklin owned a newspaper and could easily disseminate his POV more easily than the average American. The same held later for people like William Lloyd Garrison and William Randolph Hearst.
- CU didn't declare "corporations are people". That canard actually traces to an 1886 SCOTUS case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. The headnote to that opinion was written by the Court's "Reporter of Decisions" and NOT by a justice. It says "One of the points made by and discussed at length in the brief of counsel...was that "corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment...Before argument, Chief Justice Waite said: The court does not wish to hear argument on whether the Fourteenth Amendment...applies to these corporations [as persons]. We are all of the opinion that it does." In later cases (1938, Hugo Black) and 1949 (William Douglas) referred to the Santa Clara case as conferring personhood status on corporations under the Constitution.
- In CU, the Court merely noted that corporations are associations of people (as are unions) and thus constraining their speech is unconsitutional
- The Court observed that it was illogical and inequitable to treat CU differently from corporations that owned major media outlets such as newspapers, and broadcast and cable providers. To do so would be to hold that - say, the NYT or ABC - was entitled to state its election preferences right up to the day of an election while denying the right to other organizations solely on the basis of their legal form of organization, which was identical to that of most media outlets. Any distinction between CU and, for example, the NYT or ABC would be arbitrary if that distinction was based on their legal existences as corporations.
This was, like, 5 posts ago. Why is this not a comment there?
I don't think it is a bait and switch as Matt explicitly distinguishes between respecting the profit motive and billionaire positivity? The whole point is Mamdani has the first, but isn't coming around on the second? So they aren't the same?
At the risk of drudging up the old thread, because in the context of the entire economy, $1B of assets isn't that much.
Which is again, and I harp on this a lot, why the estate tax is a shittily designed tax. If it’s to prevent a class of landed gentry, then we should reward when bequests aren’t made on the basis of primogeniture. But that’s not the way the estate tax is.
Say your estate is $100m. The estate tax is the same (and it’s high, like close to half of it), no matter whether you choose to leave it to one person or whether you divide among 100 heirs. But leaving $1m to someone, while life-changing, isn’t putting that person into the class of idle gentry, unlike leaving someone $100m. We should be encouraging the division of large fortunes during inheritance by basing the inheritance tax per capita not on the basis of the total estate.
Ok, but Cea Weaver is head of his Office to Protect Tenants. TBD I guess whether she has influence in the admin (I’ll grant that deputy mayors are typically more influential than directors of newly created “offices”) but there’s nuance to this picture that you’re eliding.
I know she's a big rent control zealot and a proud hater of private developers, but I don't think any of her work will have any impact on housing supply in the city. Her job is basically going after shitty landlords for housing violations. Maybe she oversteps from time to time, but that's a negligible and indirect impact on supply.
Well the rhetoric she’s going with is “we’re going to abolish private property”, to paraphrase only slightly. And the specific direction Mamdani et al talked about going after shitty landlords consisted of remediating via confiscation and management by the city. I dunno man. I am confident (having spoken to some) that private developers do notice when the asset they’re building that they want to pitch for 50+ years of returns to Qatari oligarchs is at risk of being confiscated after 30.
We'll have to see what she does. I'm just going on the NYC housing people I trust who tell me it's not anything to worry about.
At current interest rates the present value of returns on a project after the first 30 years is in fact going to be extremely low.
I suspect her definition of "shitty landlord" is not the same definition you or I would use.
I did a clinic during my last year of law school that had me appearing in DC's landlord/tenant court on a weekly basis. It was eye opening how many unintended consequences flowed from the DC Council's attempts to "protect tenants". When you tip the scales so heavily in one direction you don't end up with magically perfect landlords maintaining idyllic properties. You end up with LOTS of truly awful landlords because the decent ones don't want to subject themselves to all the rules and regulations you've put in place that allow tenants to do things like live in your property for years without paying rent.
It was awfully hard to go through that experience and not come out of it at least a little bit more conservative on the issue than I had been going in.
Did you read about the landlord they sued on day one? Sounded pretty bad to me.
If you are referring to Pinnacle -- the one in bankruptcy -- I don't think NYC sued them, just made comments that they would "intervene" in the bankruptcy. Which I think means enforce the regulations on the debtors-in-possession, but not sure.
Was there a different one they sued?
My impression was that they also sued Pinnacle.
No, they didn't. They appeared at the bankruptcy hearing. Suits are automatically stayed while a company is in bankruptcy, so it would be silly to try and file one.
Did you hear about the gangbanger the Trump admin used as the mascot of their initiative?
So the best case argument for her is she won’t be able to do much damage?
The best argument for her is she will protect tenants against predatory landlords, while not having any effect on the supply of new housing.
I think, much like with criminal justice advocates in 2020, a lot of people find it difficult to believe that a lot of housing advocates sincerely think that all housing should be taken out of the market, that nobody should have their rent raised or be evicted, ever, for any reason, and that government should use regulations to make housing so unprofitable that it'll go out of the market.
Now, this is both unworkable as a matter of US law around takings and the actual record of tenants running their own buildings (Surfside, Fla. et al), not to mention others, but these are the people who wrote the rent laws that Cuomo signed and are behind Mamdani's housing platform.
You could just tell from Mamdani’s career and campaign that he is a smart competent person, which is not the vibe you get from some other progressive politicians. So I was optimistic on those grounds. I think that’s something that progressives should pay more attention to rather than just ideological positioning.
It’s not the vibe that you get from most politicians. That’s why Obama is still one of the most popular politicians.
“You could just tell from Mamdani’s career…”
What career?
Charismatic, sure, smart, ehhh? Very much Jon Hamm in 30 Rock vibes.
What’s a clip or moment that makes him look dumb?
Every time he gets questioned about "if government grocery stores/free buses failed everywhere else why do you propose them" he responds with a word salad mostly around the idea of "we need to try and learn from our failures", which might not be the best response to the question?
Well, like I say, I’d watch a clip.
I don't feel like Hamm's character comes across as dumb so much as clueless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAQoXOLlvT0
The guy lost one of his hands waving from a helicopter at a man in Africa he thought looked just like a black version of his high school football coach.
I'd say he was pretty stupid ;)
OK, I don't have much, if any, of Hamm's appearances memorized. The clip I posted was the top result I got for a search for "John Hamm 30 Rock" on YouTube.
Lol, I have that line memorized. It always cracked me up the way he subtly inserted that it looked like a black version of the coach.
30 Rock at its best was gold.
Mamdani keeps talking about things that are literally outside of his jurisdiction. Like, he was talking about World Cup tickets recently. There is no World Cup game in New York City. There are some in East Rutherford, but Mamdani isn't mayor of East Rutherford, and unlike Eric Adams, doesn't live in New Jersey. Maybe all of his fans really care about New Jersey. But it just seems weird to me he spends so much time talking about things he has no control over.
I think this criticism is true of Israel/Palestine but I don't hate an ability to converse about something culturally relevant. Now unfortunately in your example it was soccer, which we all know was invented by European ladies to keep them busy while the men did the cooking, but maybe he can segue into paying attention to sports people like.
I have trouble understanding how mankind’s most popular sport is one that devalues the utility of the opposable thumb. It’s a glorified version of the three-legged race.
He is a soccer fan in a city that is full of people who will go to those games. Speaking for the rage of the fans is representation.
I feel like, "Gee, sports tickets have gotten ridiculously expensive lately" is just good, relatable content for the median voter, regardless of whether he can do anything about it.
How many ticketed in-person sporting events does the median voter attend in a year? (I don’t actually know, but my best guess is zero.)
But a lot would go if the tickets were cheaper, or so they think!
If the stadia are being sold at capacity (as owners / teams are incented to ensure) then the price makes literally no difference except inasmuch as it might change the composition of attendees based on whatever alternative rationing mechanism is in place.
But I thought we were talking about as a matter of political rhetoric. The number of people who might feel they’re being priced out of sports tickets might be greater than the number who would actually get to go (or would actually choose to go) if prices were lower.
I, an upper middle class voter, have been priced out of professional sports attendance - or at least more frequent professional sports attendance. I'm probably not a representative sample, though. I'm in Cleveland, and we used to go to multiple NBA and MLB games each season, but have whittled that down to just a couple. Also had to reduce MLS attendance (in Columbus). I guess I'm technically priced out of NFL games, but we're talking about the Browns, so price is probably a lot lower on the list of reasons not to go...
There is the European solution to this: increase the supply.
There are more tickets sold to professional association football games in the UK on the average in-season weekend than to NFL games; this is entirely because there are only 32 NFL teams and therefore only 16 games, whereas there are about 120 professional teams in England/Wales and 40-50 in Scotland. The stadiums are smaller, but the top 16 games are over half the size.
Of course English games are cheaper: there are about 50% more tickets in a country (England) about a seventh the population of the US.
I have a suspicion that college football tickets are quite a bit cheaper (on average, ie including the student section and including teams outside the Power Four conferences).
Since we're talking New York, it has two NFL teams.
London (a city of comparable size) has sixteen professional (association) football teams, of which seven are currently in the Premier League.
There are around 30 other semi-professional teams (ie ones that pay their players, but not enough for it to be their sole employment)
I'm more refrring to the median NY voter, since that's Mamdani's focus. Given the NY metro area has 2 NBA teams, 2 NFL teams, 3(?) NHL teams, 2 MLB teams and numerous major college programs, it's almost certainly more than zero. And if they aren't, price is probably why.
Even their NFL teams are in New Jersey.
I meant the median NY voter. Still going with zero, but can’t go into rationale atm.
A very large part of the appeal of living in NYC is access to cultural amenities.
If the median socialist was more like Mamdani, I'd be significantly less skeptical of the whole project. Even just as rhetoric - the man can talk! I might not agree with all his views, but also he doesn't sound like some dumbass freshman who just took Comparative Continental Philosophy and Its Discontents 101 and whinges on endlessly about dialectic superstructure, man. Being able to translate finicky high-falutin' ivory ideas - whether it's neoliberal wonkery or obtuse Engels - into language that the masses can understand is a rare skill. If he manages to walk the walk too, all the better! Falling backwards into "huh, it looks like regulations hurt small businesses more than large ones" is a promising sign indeed. Somehow I'll - make a libertarian - out of you. Same with going YIMBY and (hopefully) not larding it down with social housing this, 100% affordable units that. A community imput here, a neighborhood character here, and sooner or later you're talking about real regulatory constraints. There's so many examples of progressive ideas that could lead to left-abundance, on paper, that keep failing due to poor execution; if Mamdani can stick the landing for a few, that's great for New York City, and also for setting a higher bar elsewhere. There's a lot of ruin in dense blue metros...
(Not sure what he has against Frigidaire though - they do make quality rugged iceboxes. Who'd want to buy a refrigerator from a company called Warmth?)
I think a socialist New York City mayor has vastly more impact on the whole project than the median socialist who is exactly as you describe.
Marx in the classroom
Hayek in the boardroom
I think this article is insane copium. His staffing decisions do not point to moderation which is really the only actionable thing to judge him on.
He’s appointed a tenant rights czar who has been very explicit in wanting to find ways to expropriate property. His administration is advocating a housing system that makes it functionally impossible for any building owner of rent stabilized housing to remain solvent. He has very deliberately not mentioned NYCHA’s constant problems with terrible conditions, illegal subletting, and nuisance tenants.
He’s repeatedly made clear his intention on criminal justice is to push the same failed progressive ideologies that allow all sorts of quality of life crimes to continue with minimal or no punishment.
He has made zero overtures to making improvements to the education system that would keep middle or upper middle class families from fleeing NYC schools if they can’t afford private.
He has made zero overtures to examining the web of nonprofit vendors that make up over 15% of the city’s budget.
If you want to know someone's overarching vision, listen to their words. As you noted: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."
No thanks.
I read the whole transcript and that weird statement wasn't as Stalinist as it appears but it was stupidly clumsy. Best I can tell, he was talking about the importance of New York's various ethnic communities and how they can come together to all be New Yorkers:
"They will be Russian Jewish immigrants in Brighton Beach, Italians in Rossville, and Irish families in Woodhaven . . . Few of these eight and a half million will fit into neat and easy boxes. Some will be voters from Hillside Avenue or Fordham Road who supported President Trump a year before they voted for me. . . And if for too long these communities have existed as distinct from one another, we will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it. Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from, the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/nyregion/mamdani-inauguration-speech-transcript.html
Cea Weaver sure is getting ratioed on X for her assertion (link below) that homes will be a "collective good"...especially if you are White. I guess every civic leader is entitled to one screwball advisor.
https://x.com/i/status/2008074737323311364
She didn't say the "especially if you are White" part, that was inserted by the person in the link.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1370921820834149
Unfortunately, it is a Facebook link, but here is the actual video. She does get rather specific about white people. Why mention race at all?
I should have put it better above. It's not in the X link given, but I shouldn't have said it in a way that suggested she didn't say it in other contexts.
"...especially white families..." to be sure.
On housing he has not moderated.
On January 1 he held a press conference at a privately-owned rent stabilized building and called the landlord a slumlord and a speculator. Then today in court they filed an intervention into the bankruptcy and said it shouldn't be sold to a private operator because ‘the current rents are very-low averaging’ and too many of the apartments under regulated. They are arguing for the bankruptcy sale to be halted and the city to begin an in rem proceeding to take the 5,100 unit portfolio.
Meanwhile on Sunday, he praised a nonprofit building in the Bronx with a government regulatory agreement, and pays no taxes, as a success story. The nonprofit building has 58% more immediately hazardous violations (rats, mice, walls caving in) then the bankrupt building he criticized. The buildings also have roughly the same amount of debt. $110k per unit for the bankrupt building and $99k for the nonprofit with government backing.
So it is clear the agenda is not better housing conditions for tenants. It is ending private ownership. At least in his first week in office.
“ending private ownership”
That is somewhat removed from the remit of the mayor’s office.
Mayor’s office can continue to over tax older rent-regulated buildings and increase water and sewer costs — and freeze rents — that will accelerate default and now they will intervene in bankruptcies and foreclosures to prevent transfer to new private ownership.
He will run out of gov’t budget money soon though.
I suppose he could do emergency repairs to the property and then placing a lien on it for the expense, but that only encumbers a transfer to new ownership. It doesn't prevent it.
> The Upper East Side was a stronghold of anti-Mamdani voting and is very transit-oriented.
This is not well known, but we have a transit field in our bodies and when you step out you swivel to orient yourself along the nearest subway line. And then you bobble towards the station and board a train. Whether you wanted to or not.
Whenever I found myself on the Upper East Side, the only thing on my mind was leaving.
With our excellent transit orientation, we have you covered.
You are noble, indeed, to be mixing with the hoi polloi.
I wonder what devices you could power with the currents induced in the transit-oriented New Yorkers by the transit field? Do the New Yorkers generate their own field? They probably have a short-range force of repulsion between them.
The Standard Model does not account for this field.
Gradually Matt is coming around to the realization that the left is the only possible vehicle for YIMBY ideas in American politics and he'll have to join us on team Sewer Socialism. :)
I think Matt has mostly been skeptical that there *is* a sewer socialist team in American politics. The concern being that the Left will deliver housing abundance the way California has delivered high speed rail.
It would be very nice for that concern to wrong.
I think, as Matt regularly points out, it is the mainstream of the democratic party that has failed CAHSR as with much else.
You don't consider the mainstream California Democratic party to be the left?
I think the mainstream of the CA Democrats is the mainstream of the national party; they supplied the 2024 nominee and the current 2028 polling leader.
I'm not sure how that changes the question. Do you not consider the mainstream of the Democratic party to be the left, especially after the party has moved to the left significantly over the last 20 years?
There's a sense in which the Democratic party is the left party in the US, but by "the left" I specifically meant the left wing faction in politics (Bernie, AOC, Mamdani, etc).
The left is many things. Zephyr Teachout isn't going to be the vehicle for YIMBY
Right that's why we need more people like Matt on the team, to beat Teachout and Karen Bass and the rest.
Teachout endorsed and campaigned with Mamdani and was on his transition team
That doesn't mean he endorsed her. This is pretty much Matt's point.
I think there's been some miscalibration on this because the fights in California have built a strong association between YIMBY and "moderates", but the "moderate" faction in San Francisco is well to the left of, say, Andrew Cuomo.
In general, 'moderates' in the Democratic party, as I think Matt is noticing a lot more recently, represent the interests of small-c conservative homeowners, which makes them a poor vehicle for YIMBY.
I clocked the smiley at the end but in case you’re at least partially serious, don’t Montana and Texas prove this is not true?
Matt has written about how Houston actually isn't the YIMBY paradise people say. I think in practice urbanism via Republicans will be harder to accomplish than it seems.
"He is promising concrete deregulatory measures to help small businesses thrive. It’s just straightforward, moderate pro-business politics facilitated by some ideological fudging."
The Democratic Party needs to adopt this measure and incorporate an 'abundance' style attitude towards small business growth. I see this becoming especially more important as market concentration and economic power increasingly are housed within the top ten largest companies. This is getting slightly off topic but the U.S. is basically putting all its eggs into the A.I. basket; spurring small business growth by cutting red tape would be a way to help diversify the tax base and incentivize investment in local businesses if the demand surrounding A.I. is slow going or even fails to take off.
As an early anti-anti-Mamdani poster here— and specifically somebody who held that view because I recognized that he was pragmatic and willing to embrace housing abundance— I feel pretty vindicated by how things played out.
It’s Jan 6th dude.
Mamdani "has remained uncompromisingly progressive on Palestine." Should I really care what the mayor of New York's stance is on this issue? Is that part of his job description? What does he think about Ukraine? Who does he think will win the Super Bowl?
It's at least noteworthy that the Israeli government cares a lot about what the New York mayor's stance is, and has a lot to say about it. So maybe it does matter, even if we don't care.
The Netanyahu government cares about a lot of things it shouldn’t care about.
If the Prime Minister of Israel is not comfortable visiting the city in the world with the largest Jewish and Israeli diaspora because of fear of arrest, that’s a very good reason to care
As I recall, he has good reason to fear being in Israel due to arrest, trial, or conviction on criminal charges there too - it's a major problem having a criminal as a leader!
Probably has to do with the fact that Bibi grew up in NYC
We really shouldn't, except that a considerable slice of the NYC electorate has historically cared very much about it.
To be fair, Eric Adams spent a lot of time on this issue as well. In general, you’re absolutely right about this. The more time Mamdani spends on this, the worse a mayor he will be.
If I were a NY Post editor, getting Mamdani's stance on Ukraine is something I'd assign a reporter to.
Should probably care about the violence against Jews in NY though